Seth Goldstein

Web Alchemy

Exactly two years ago, in April 2005, I wrote the first chapter on Alchemy in the Media Futures series.  Over the course of history, Alchemy always promised more than it could deliver.  But it was this promise that captured the imagination of people and drew their Attention to the very impossibility of turning “base metal into gold.”

As it relates to the contemporary Web landscape, Alchemy represents the promise of automatic personalized media creation.  It is the nuclear fission of intersecting Web 2.0 services.  "Maybe, just maybe, if I go to Web 2.0 Expo I will find that one service that that connects me most fully?"  This is the process of extreme triangulation that we- maybe without even knowing- are trying to achieve every moment that we use the Internet to express ourselves.

The process is not new.  But its reception is.

When Josh Harris broadcast his life in real-time on weliveinpublic.org in 2000, it was received as strange exhibitionism in SoHo.  He and his girlfriend Tanya Corin went online in a Warhol art-house kind of way.  It wasn’t clear what exactly Josh was trying to prove, but like many I was fascinated by the embedded cameras he installed in the Turkish-style bath.

On Day 93, long after Tanya walked out and Josh had left it to brokers to sell the 4000 sf+ loft on lower Broadway, a recently arrived journalist who needed a place to crash ended up minding after the apt while it was being shown to potential buyers.  All the surveillance gear was very much in place and there was a working live control room where all the cameras flowed into, as well as the external chatter from those across the community grabbing these streams.  This writer describes what it was like to be there during these last days:

I am doing laundry all the next day, sitting alone, and I learn how to take advantage of the chatters. After all, I am a visitor in the house of a man I do not know. But they, they’ve lived here for a while… I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where an iron is. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I have lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happens to see where I might have left them. One guy tells me to check my pockets. And there they were.
From The Cyber House Rules By Will Leitch, Jan  1, 1999

Eight years ago when he wrote this, we had a different attitude towards pervasive surveillance than we have today.   Now, as American Idol, YouTube, Twitter and countless other social media phenomena would attest, the quickest road to celebrity is via one’s willingness to become-  physically or behaviorally- naked.

And so, how then to describe the performance of Justin.TV?  His omnipresent camera cylinder to the left of his perspective is like the pen-above-the-ear of a great investigative journalist- Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the Presidents Men.

Despite his camera, Justin doesn’t care about coming off as a disinterested reporter.  There is no longer even a pretense that the subject drives the interview.  Maybe it’s wrong to think of it as an interview at all.  The  recording instruments are so integrated and obvious that everybody Justin comes into contact with gets their own live studio audience.  This shifts the lens of narcissism from Justin to his audience, making him seem almost, well, selfless.

Michael Goldhaber recently defined a "star" as:

(When an attent typically has many audients, thus taking in more net attention than paying out, that person is of course a STAR.  )

On the Internet, this is based in large part on one’s ability to express oneself openly, across multiple networks.  For example, in addition to the live video feed and community chat, Justin makes it easy for us to connect to him via shared social networks:

Justin wants people to pay close Attention to his stream and comment on his blog. This is exactly how stars enrapture their fans:  engaging them in production of the very stardom they wish to worship.  There is a significant difference between celebrity in the first Internet cycle and now.  It is not the tools that matter, since many of them have not changed dramatically, but a growing responsibility that more and more of us feel to express our unique, authentic selves online.

Justin.TV, like Tia Tequila of MySpace, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zukerberg of Facebook and Fred Wilson of Typepad, inspire us to be all that we can be online- to open up our API and let the data flow.   

This is the Summer of Love, 40 years later transposed onto the Web.

The History of Alchemy

Practiced in civilizations across the world from ancient times up through the 19th century, the early proto-scientific and philosophical discipline of alchemy is most widely understood as the quest to achieve the transmutation of base metals into the precious metals of gold or silver, as well as the creation of a panacea, which promised to cure all disease, rendering immortality a fate not only reserved for the gods. Taking the commonality of properties of the known metals (gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury) as evidence of a commonality of composition, alchemists operated on the assumption that they might somehow correct the composition of the base metal, rendering it pure gold. To do so, they needed the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir, which would speed up that process of transmutation which, occurring naturally underground, would require the passage of thousands of years.

We might imagine the history of alchemy as a curious double-helix, its Eastern and Western strands decidedly separate but linked by certain commonalities. The Eastern strand of the history of alchemy finds its root in China, where alchemy was closely linked with the pursuit of health through traditional Taoist forms of medicine (specifically Acupuncture and Moxibustion, a therapy that uses mugwort herb to stimulate the circulation of blood through warm regions of the body and key acupuncture points). In that it was not so much concerned with the transmutation of base metals to previous metals, Chinese alchemy stood apart from its Western cousin, but it had its own version of the Philosopher’s Stone, which they called the Grand Elixir of Immortality.

But it is Egypt that promises to remain immortal when it comes to the discussion of the history of alchemy, its position of privilege perhaps embedded in the word alchemy itself. The etymology of the word is contested, traced to the Arabic al-kīmiya or al-khīmiya, meaning “cast together”, “pour together” or “weld”, as well as to the Persian Kimia, meaning “gold.” Others, though, read al- kīmiya as “the Egyptian [science]”, having been borrowed from the Copic word for “Egypt”, or kēme, which is itself derived from a chain that leads back to the ancient Egyptian term for the color black and the country of Egypt itself, kmt.

It is the god Thoth (also referred to as Hermes-Thoth) to whom mythology attributes the honor of being the founder of Egyptian mythology. It his forty-two Books of Knowledge, Thoth wrote in part on alchemy, but it is his Emerald Tablet, preserved Greek and Arabic translations, that is said to form a critical foundation in the alchemy of the West. Like Thoth’s Emerald Tablet, the only works of Egyptian alchemy available today have survived through such Greek and Arabic translations. As the Macedonians conquered Egypt in the 4th century, so came Greek language and culture in tow – and any Egyptian writings on alchemical philosophy and practice were likely burned as a part of Diocletian’s attempts to suppress a 292 revolt in Alexandria, that center of knowledge which figured so prominently in our histories of Automata and Algorithm.

There in Alexandria, the Greeks brought their philosophies of Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism together with the Egyptian hermetic philosophy, the principle tenet of which is called the macrocosm-microcosm belief: “in truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.” That central belief, that the exterior world, or the macrocosm, affects the human body, or the microcosm, interacted with the belief that numbers rule the universe, that the universe could be explained by examining natural phenomena and that the world was created in a flawed manner, thereby rendering it imperfect (Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism, respectively, and grossly oversimplified) to create a tradition that left us with the idea that everything in the universe was formed from the elements earth, air, water and fire.

As the Greeks adopted Egyptian alchemical knowledge and traditions, so adopted the Romans the knowledge and traditions of the Greeks. But Christianity then swept through the empire, bringing Christian philosophies, and particularly those of Augustine, into contention with Hermetic ideals. Augustine believed experimental philosophy to be evil and ungodly, maintaining people could understand God through reason and faith. Augustine’s philosophies were in turn used to argue that alchemy was evil and ungodly. But alchemy already had its niche in the Christian tradition, grandfathered in by Greek and Roman culture. As medieval Europe saw Christian philosophers challenge Augustinian doctrine, its alchemists worked from the contributions from the Islamic world, which became the premier stage for scientific and alchemical development after the fall of Rome.

Islamic alchemists were responsible for the technique of distillation; they discovered sulfuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids – and, perhaps most importantly, that the latter two could be mixed together and used to dissolve gold, the noblest of metals. The philosopher Jabir Ibn Hayyan, referred to in English as Geber, remains one of the most influential writers in the history of alchemy, for it was he who sought after the artificial creation of life in the laboratory. He described the elements in terms of their hotness, coldness, dryness and moistness – qualities which could be altered in the laboratory and rearranged, thus resulting in a new metal. He thus introduced the search for the philosopher’s stone, a central thrust of the Western alchemical tradition.

Though many philosophized about alchemy in the early stages of the millennium, some historians argue that the first alchemical experimentation in medieval Europe did not occur until the 13th century, when Roger Bacon is said to have brought on the search for the elixir of life. Bacon’s contributions to science were widespread: in addition to his work in alchemy, he analyzed convex glasses and lenses, invented spectacles, theorized about the telescope and, lest we forget, created the talking head automaton.

Bacon’s European contemporaries were to a great extent members of the clergy, those who had access to and the education to read the world’s assembled alchemical oeuvre. As the 13th century drew to a close, there was an established architecture of alchemical belief, including the aforementioned macrocosm-microcosm theories, the four elements and the four qualities. But most importantly, these Christian alchemists believed that their art could reunite man and God – for if man’s soul had been divided with Adam’s fall, so could the separate parts be purified and brought together again. These philosophies would be struck down in the next century, with the edict of Pope John XXII against alchemy removing clergymen from its practice.

The alchemy of the next three hundred years was thus one of a much different character. Alchemists returned their efforts to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, and influential figures like Nicolas Flamel and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa contributed to a major shift in the classification of the art – namely, alchemy went from being characterized as a mystical philosophy to that of an occultist magic. This shift set alchemy up to be struck down by the thinkers of the Age of Reason, who favored rigorous experimentation over such seeds of ancient wisdom. The prescient Paracelsus, perhaps the most important alchemist during the Renaissance, had perceived the occultist label a threat to the alchemical arts as a whole, and as such, he pushed back, casting some occultist threads and Gnostic philosophies out of his alchemical fabric, choosing to focus his efforts on using chemicals and minerals in medicine to achieve a healthy balance in human bodies. But the work of Paracelsus could still not overcome all that occultist image carried with it, all the fallout created by the charlatans and cons who promised transmutation but produced trash.

We might read the intentions of the earliest alchemists as the same as those of the Internet alchemists of today: above all else, the these alchemists concern themselves with the study of changes in the material world and how they might be able to harness the power of these changes for their own purpose and benefit. These solitary materials scientists, mixing various elements together to render their combinations far more valuable than the sums of their parts, set the stage for the Internet alchemists of today, who, in harnessing the power of the changes of Internet media and create entities which are far more valuable.

This alchemy takes place in large part in the act of naming – a company, an index, a domain, a category, a database class – for in that move to name, the Internet alchemist creates something far more than simply a representation of some external object or idea.

Thanks to Maggie Dillon for helping with this research

The most valuable form of attention is that which you are most reluctant to part with.

This is what you do, privately, that you dont wish to share with anybody else, including your friends, family and maybe even your spouse.  Oftentimes we are even willing to pay subscription fees for content that we wish to consume in complete confidence.     Perhaps this is because we intuit that ad-supported media has a way of capturing information about our attention that we don’t wish to share.

A few weeks ago my friend Scott Heiferman of meetup.com came by to visit on the eve of a board meeting in SF.   I was astounded at the hundreds of thousands of live, real-life group meet-ups he has facilicated from a simple software platform.  Scott has always been a champion of expressing yourself on the Internet, from his first days at iTraffic when he taught his clients how to market links to their own web sites.   Before search engine optimization and marketing, remember, the primary traffic generators were banners.  A few years ago he became fascinated with the idea of putting pictures online, even before flickr shifted their focus from mmorgs to images.   So Scott started a company called Fotolog, which is one one of the most popular Spanish-language sites in the world (even if it is driven by intense social media consumption in Brazil).

Over dinner, Scott said that he had swore off mail and rss clients, and had gone entirely to the Web, courtesy of Google.  I asked him if he had seen what Google was now offering to users of its reader product, in terms of helping them understand which feeds they were paying the most Attention to.  No surprise that I believe that the socialization of Attention data will usher in the next great wave of innovation online; and I shared my enthusiasm with Scott about a world where people were able to (selectively) expose various aspects of their online behavior to others that they trust.  I encouraged Scott to log in to his Google Reader account so he could see what i meant.    He paused for a moment, obviously not willing to share this level of intimacy with me and said:

"You know Seth, I would be embarassed for you to know how much time i spend each day reading Valleywag.”

It was only fitting, then, that I got Valleywagged last week for wading too deep in theory: late Monday night I ruminated over how the identity of a blogger essentially becomes the clicks that lead to the blog ("products of environment" in the always clarifying words of Yardley.ca) and then Tuesday morning I awake to see a rash of new incoming clicks from Valleywag.  Valleywag c’est moi.  Not quite sure what to make of the Transparent Bundles - Valleywag mashup.  Reminds me of when Brecht traveled to Hollywood to write screenplays…

At the First Round Capital dinner at Bibibbo in Menlo Park, I ran into Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures who leaned over and apologized for not understanding what I was talking about in my last post.  And so there I was, after a day of absorbing Michael Arrington’s perfect pitch lunch address; Fox’s Heather Hardee establish a modicum of  diplomacy with 3rd party widget networks on MySpace; and Google’s Chris Sacca remind us that there is no better place to find meaning in your work than inside of their work; than I was reminded to start making sense.

“Cookies are worth dimes, but profiles are worth dollars”

Scott Rafer’s performance at Web 2.0 in October, where he pitched 10+ Yahoo! execs in a row, may forever cast him as the Paul Revere of this pending revolution:  “Attention is coming… attention is coming!”   This was a transformative event, if only because it put an real value (ie $10+ million) on otherwise invisible data about people reading blogs.   Sure, we have recognized the economic value of explicit social media- user generated videos (ie YouTube), tags (ie del.icio.us) and photos (ie flickr); but this was the first time that the implicit, behavioral contributions of users were valued as an asset.

Eric and Todd started MyBlogLog as a stats package, which dropped a cookie on each reader so as to report better stats back to the writer of the blog.   As blogs have taken off, MBL was able to drop more and more cookies on the machines of users that it otherwise had no relationship with.   This “worthless traffic” of readers would have remained such if it were not for a unique insight by Rafer.   His contribution, having no doubt listened to one of the many sermons on Attention, was to see the cookie as a social media input.   Why not give readers of blogs the opportunity to express their readership to the writers they visit?  In other words, why not enable users to connect their anonymous implicit cookies to their personal explicit profiles?

This was a simple enough proposition but amounts, in my mind, to something new and important:  the reader as activist.  Offering little more than the ability to have your icon appear on the blogs that you visit, MBL turned the cookie from something that exposes you to something that expresses you.    What had always been limited to passive behavioral data for publishers and advertisers to target against had now become something different- a continuous stream of active Attention gestures.    As Scott recounted, “They [Eric and Todd] were gathering implicit data before I got there.  We added explicit, public rendering of that implicit data."

Yahoo!’s decision to purchase MBL makes sense as a means of converting some of their 150+ million  “worthless” page views into opt-in Attention profiles.  Already, groups are starting to form within the MBL communities that recognize their own opportunity to “vote with their feet” which in this case would be more akin to marketing through their clicks.   For example, just think of small groups of members, organized around a cause or particular passion, descending en masse upon a site.  The widget expressing the last 10 readers suddenly becomes a powerful tool for asserting a certain position.  First comes the inane home town fans click-pack with each user wearing a Cincinnatti Reds baseball hat in the picture on his profile; then come the more interesting political agendas and petitions.

One thing is for sure- behavioral targeting companies such as Tacoda, Revenue Science and Blue Lithium have no choice but to align themselves with the user in control.  In the wake of MBL/Yahoo!, these behavioral networks can no longer sell advertising through publishers without giving some real functional or economic benefit back to the the users creating the behavior to begin with.    And because these networks dont have a profile-based relationship with their audience, they have to start from scratch.

Please allow me to introduce myself

Im a man of wealth and taste

Ive been around for a long, long year

Stole many a mans soul and faith…

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name 

Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Enabling readers to express their unique identities with minimal transaction costs is what the best social media services are able to achieve.  The vast majority, however, fall on either side of this:  either they are too sheepish to let their users know how much they really know about them, or they are too presumptuous and excite privacy hysteria.  One young entrepreneur who has been building fair-trade Attention services put it best when he said:

I’ve often wondered if and when users will become aware of the value their data holds, and whether they’ll demand ownership of it, or simply throw a fit that such data is being mined.