Andrew Orlowski

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Dr Yong-Kyung Lee, head of Korea Telecom and a policy advisor to the Korean government, amazed delegates with his descriptions of high tech Korea. Lee was a Bell Labs R&D guy for years, but for the last decade has had an entire country to play with.

But one factoid emerged unscripted.

There are now 100 hospital centres to treat people for internet addiction in Korea, he told us casually.

This brought gasps of astonishment from the audience, as well it might. Can anyone confirm this? Have you checked into a Korean internet addiction centre recently? If so, send us an email. In fact, send us an email if you’re in Korea and had an accident and were looking for A&E, or were visiting a relative, but wandered into a Korean internet addiction centre by mistake. We don’t care. We want to know more.

When Carter’s Digital Britain report is published, we’ll look out to see if the therapy industry will be rewarded here, as it is over there.

It’s going to get Britain booming again.
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Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job.

The rest of the world, however, completely ignores it. But with the journalists’ attention fixed firmly on each others’ navels, they don’t seem to realise what a fringe activity Twitter is. Now we can quantify this a little.

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Rights to the celebrated documentary The Clangers are changing hands. Often mistakenly described as “a children’s programme”, the 1970s series revealed for the first time the existence of an advanced knitwear-based lunar civilisation, knowledge of which has been suppressed by governments and space agencies ever since.

Not only was the vast body of evidence of the Clanger civilisation never formally acknowledged by NASA, but neither was a great deal of natural lunar vegetation (sentient music trees) and unique geographical features (soup wells).

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Federal investigators have hit a California biker gang where it hurts – by seizing the group’s trademark. The Mongols OutLaw Biker Gang [website] attracted the attention of the DoJ’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Department, with 61 indictments issued today. Search warrants were issued in six states yesterday, following a long undercover investigation. Gang members’ bikes were impounded, but it’s the seizure of the Mongol’s trademark that will raise eyebrows.

Under Federal racketeering laws, introduced in 1970 to counter organised crime, “any property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross proceeds obtained, directly or indirectly,” can be forfeited from indictment for specific criminal activity.

So, what’s the DoJ doing grabbing IP? Well, the DoJ’s Thomas O’Brien says it’s because the gang initially trademarked the name Mongols and the distinctive design as part of their patch. In a statement, he explained:

“We have filed papers seeking a court order that will prevent gang members from using or displaying the name ‘Mongols.’ If the court grants our request for this order, then if any law enforcement officer sees a Mongol wearing his patch, he will be authorized to stop that gang member and literally take the jacket right off his back.”

But not so fast.

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“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population”
– Joi Ito

“Igor, to the machines – we have a sample”

One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.

AOL’s assiduous documentation of the private thoughts of over 600,000 web searchers has certainly added some much needed sparkle to a public internet that of late, has been in dire need of a tonic. Now, internet users’ most private thoughts are revealed, in all their banality and creepiness, and we must count ourselves fortunate.

“AOL’s data sketch sometimes scary picture of personalities searching Net,” was the headline USA Today newspaper chose, but this barely conveyed the voyeuristic frisson, or glee we felt as the AOL database made its way across the net.

Nothing in recent months has made the net come alive quite like these queries, and it’s not hard to see why. Recently, the net has been drowning in banality. Billions of identical blogs – some human generated, some machine generated – spring up every day, with identical opinions to match the identical templates each blog hoster seems to provide. This outpouring of new recorded writing has been trumpeted as a new era in human expression. But the truth is, in practice, the consequence of all this is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell which is which. Human, or machine?

But let’s focus on an aspect lost in the “scandal”. The thing that everyone has overlooked is that this wasn’t an accidental or negligent data loss by AOL. The search query data was sincerely released in the name of science.

Boffins at AOL Labs published the data for boffins at similar “labs” to peruse.

That’s strange enough in itself, and it should make you yearn for white-coated frontiersmen of yore. Things have changed a bit since then and now.

Behold: the Mighty Atom
Fifty years ago, scientists did things like, oh… split the atom, and deduce the shape of the DNA double helix. Today, working off the hottest and freshest evidence available, scientists proclaim breakthroughs such as “People get more drunk at weekends”.

Once upon a time scientists set out to describe the unknown, and make it understood in
mechanical terms. But now, like a group of well meaning, but slightly simple lifelong in-patients making their first tentative steps into the real world, they venture out to find what’s on their doorsteps.

Now, if science is to have any useful purpose in society, it’s in describing the unknown, not the bleeding obvious. No wonder it has gotten such a bad name recently.
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Interbreeding between humans and aliens is a recurrent theme of science fiction – and late night talk radio. But could an example we’ve unearthed from near San Francisco, California, prove to be the first living example?

Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have access to our own stock of Martian DNA – courtesy, of course, of cult commentator and philosopher amanfromMars.

The startling discovery that DNA may have leaped across planetary boundaries comes courtesy of literary agent John Brockman.

Brockman runs an online groupthink “salon”, called Edge.org, where his indentured science authors and a select band of ideologically-correct journalists are invited to congratulate each other on their insight. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Edge before – it’s only ever mentioned by Blokes who are already in it, or Blokes who would sell their mothers to get in.)

But it’s here, at Edge, that Brockman may have unearthed the greatest scoop of his lifetime; for here at least, one Martian-human hybrid walks amongst us.

New Year’s Day found a curious declaration credited to one “Kevin Kelly” – editor in chief of WiReD magazine.

“The success of the Wikipedia (sic) keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better,” he writes.

Of course, that’s an easy mistake to make… if you’ve just arrived from another planet. Here’s a more accurate measure of success, from earth-bound observers SomethingAwful.

Yet the alien visitor must be impressed by the high ethical standards exhibited by the project, its fair-mindedness, tolerance and generosity, and of course, its uniquely bottom-up democratic nature, for he is mightily impressed. So much so, that he sees in it a new way of organising society:

“The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable… I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world.”

Alarm bells really ought to be clanging by this point. The Martian-Martian hybrid is using terms he has apparently heard, but doesn’t really understand – and can’t relate to the world around him.

The next statement can be construed as a promise that the hybrid DNA is here to stay:

“It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colours …

Finally, here’s the clincher:

“I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.”

Pure Martian.

taste of bacon, either.)

However, as we discovered when we interviewed the creator of an “Artificial Intelligence Chat-bot”, programmers who develop algorithms tend to encode their own shortcomings into the systems they create. [see Do Artificial Intelligence Chatbots look like their programmers? ]

And the Times confirms that the job-bot’s selection criteria is based on surveys from existing staff. One of the indicators is ominously called “organizational citizenship”. No square pegs in those round holes, then.

In Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, the company’s monoculture is enforced by obedience to the cult of personality – top down. By contrast, Google appears to be developing its monoculture from the bottom-up. But it’s still a monoculture – and one only likely to be reinforced by algorithmic rejection of “unsuitable” candidates.

As we discussed here recently, an algorithmically-minded corporation is ill-equipped likely to miss problems that can’t be solved algorithmically. No robot can wish them away.

If you have an amusing experience of Google’s recruitment practices – successful or otherwise – share it with us here. We’ll set our own robot on the replies, and pick out the ones whose opinions most closely resemble our own.

(Just kidding).

Tags: Fun, google
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