Seth Goldstein

APIs are the printing presses of social media.  Like Gutenberg’s machines, APIs are uninteresting in and of themselves, but absolutely essential for the transmission of important ideas between people.   We learn about APIs by paying attention to what exists on either side of them:  Who is the sender? Who is the receiver? What is being communicated?   As we answer these questions, we endow the API with meaning.

Over time, some APIs become more than just generic transport mechanisms; some become destinations in their own right.  For example, the Flickr API is one such case, where its proximity to interesting data streams seems to have emboldened its management to claim interestingness as their own invention .

My original goal for introducing the API as one of the five elements of Media Futures was to emphasize its function as the natural transport mechanism through which human data streams turn into money.

… establish the API as a key component of media futures, specifically as the hinge between the algorithm that processes raw human meta data and the moment of alchemy that occurs when you discover something you didn’t even know you were looking for, courtesy of some people that you didn’t even know that you knew.  Media Futures 2005:  API

It is difficult to talk directly about APIs since their value is based  on their role as vessels for the movement of data between people.  Perhaps in order to describe an API, therefore, one needs to use language similar to that used in describing global currencies or financial instruments- price, liquidity and volatility.  We want to know the value of the data moving across boundaries, how robust the stream is, and how frequently it changes in any significant way. 

And so as I license access to an API, what I am really doing is entering into a contract to take delivery of information in the future.  I call  the server, with the expectation of receiving a certain type of information in a certain format.  My hunch is that this information, so delivered, is going to attract the attention of others more so than I might have with my own internal data.

The quick investment math I do, therefore, as a Web Services trader, is to gauge whether the cost (mostly technical and opportunity, sometimes financial) of accessing a particular stream is less than the incremental value it will add to my social media application on a go-forward basis.  The instruments that I am trading are, of course, people.  And the way that I am able to distinguish one meta data belly from another is based on the richness and authenticity of the human data stream.  Just as there are different grades of Gold, or Corn, or Bonds for that matter, there are different qualities of "natural" human API streams.

We need to go back a bit, 50 years in fact, to trace back the history of social media computing (aka cybernetics) to a genuine concern for the natural expressivity of human beings.  In his 1954 book, the Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Weiner prefigures the radical support of user in control that we see today in the work of Steve Gillmor at AttentionTrust and Mitchell Baker at Mozilla.

It is my thesis that the operation of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel.  Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation:  that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine.  In both cases, these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead.  The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance.  …our view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government.  Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions.  Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return.  The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism.  I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste.
Norbert Weiner, 1954, The Human Use of Human Beings

Herein lies the key to creating meaningful APIs:  attributing full status to the Internet user.   What does this status mean exactly for media companies in November 2006?  Mitchell Baker captures this  particularly well when she writes that:

Each individual is not just an exporter of raw data that others process to gain value out of and sell back to her, her place on the value chain is much higher.  She should be able to weave the data into a fabric that represents her value, and she should benefit from that value.

The act of weaving that Baker refers to is a classical gesture.  It invokes the same Greek Sieve that I  referred to a few months back in the discussion of Algorithm.  The gestures of social media, however, want to be consumed electronically so that they can spread without the usual gravity that keeps local physical gestures in their place.  The evolution from physical gestures to electronic gestures as it relates to the future history of APIs is the subject of the next and final essay on API, before we move on to Alchemy.

API stands for Application Programming Interface.  In the context of Media Futures, an API routes the output from one’s own unique Attention-processing Algorithm  into an Alchemical reaction triggered by the convergence of other human-driven APIs.

I wrote my first post about APIs in the Spring of 05, at a moment when APIs such as those of Flickr and del.icio.us were just starting to become becoming popular targets of developers.  Since then, the subject of APIs has become commonplace in any discussion of the future of media.  In fact AOL- that stalwart of old new media- is now obsessed with open APIs.  Tina calls it the “the liberation of egosystems.”  Open data transport has suddenly become de riguer among the even the most traditional media companies.  In less than two weeks, legions of their corporate development executives will descend upon SF to walk down the red carpet of the O’Reilly ceremony, ready to sign the top Web 2.0 talent to long-term studio deals.

But while we all fall over ourselves to proclaim our “openness,” we introduce a far heavier burden of trust into the mix.  Is one company’s “open” the same as another’s?  While I may be able to avoid data lock-in in that silo, how do i know for sure the next “open data” silo will be equally amenable to the mobility of my data?  These questions beg a deeper investigation into the history of APIs and their evolution both physically and electronically.

History

In a memorandum dated July 15, 1949, Warren Weaver, who held the position of director of the division of natural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932 – 1955, wrote about the possibility of language translation by an electronic computer.  It was the first suggestion most had seen that such a thing might be possible, and as he draws the memorandum to a close, his words preview the emergence of the API:

Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation.  When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower.  It is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed.  But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers.  Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers.

Thus may it be true that the way to translate from Chinese to Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not to attempt the direct route, shouting from tower to tower.  Perhaps the way is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication – the real but as yet undiscovered universal language – and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.  Such a program involves a presumably tremendous amount of work in the logical structure of languages before one would be ready for any mechanization.

The key to examining the evolution of the role of the API in context of Media Futures lies, in fact, in the multiple resonances of its last term, Interface:  as a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, thus forming their common boundary; as a means or location of interaction between two systems or organizations; as an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly, the abstract concept of an interface contains in it the possibility of a very literal connection between two beings, two faces.  As a physical interface connects two pieces of hardware, a user interface connects a human and a computer and a software interface connects separate software components so that they may communicate with one another.  To interface is to come into interaction with a thing or being, to communicate, in manners both figurative and literal.

Mainframes

As a platform that allows a computer system, library or application to open itself to use by other computer programs, or to allow for the exchange of data between them, the APIs of yesterday were IBM mainframes and Microsoft SDKs, arcane languages of translation between hardware and software.

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, a number of American, German and British manufacturers (Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and UNIVAC; Siemens and Telefunken; and ICL, respectively), produced such mainframes, computers used in large part by companies and government institutions for the purposes of bulk data processing in the context of, for example, the census or financial transaction processing.  IBM secured itself a position of power in the industry with the development of its 700/7000 series, based on vacuum tubes and transistors, and with its 360 series mainframe.  Unveiled in 1964, the 360 series was to be an all-around computer system, a series of compatible models for purposes both scientific and commercial – a series which, moreover, brought together features which were once only available in scientific or commercial computers, such as floating point arithmetic in the former and decimal arithmetic and byte addressing in the latter.  The 360 series also included supervisor and application mode programs and instructions and built-in memory protection facilities, making it one of the first computers manufactured with provisions specific to the use of an operating system.

Console of an IBM 360/67 mainframe

PCs

As the demand for the older mainframe systems fell off, new installations were seen mainly in the realms of finance and the government.  Personal computer networks came to challenge the mainframe.  It was during the rise of personal computing networks, though, that the APIs with which we are most familiar came into being and, in the case of Windows, achieved dominance. 

In 1975, the Altair 8800 was introduced in Popular Electronics, a personal computer that was affordable, user-friendly, and, some argue, the spark that set Apple Computer and Microsoft ablaze in their development of personal computers. The Apple II, though less capable and versatile than some of the larger computers of the day, gave computer enthusiasts an environment in which to develop their own programming skills and to operate simple office and productivity applications. 

The IBM PC released in 1981 took the personal computer into the realm of business, giving individual users word processing programs, spreadsheet programs and database programs which would change the way businesses stored, sorted and used their data. Four years later in 1985, in order to compete with the graphical user interfaces made popular by Apple, Microsoft released an add-on to MS-DOS – an operating environment known as Windows.

Though that release of Windows was not an operating system in the full sense of the term, it had pushed beyond the characteristics of a typical desktop, adopting some functions of operating systems.  Windows achieved a leg up on competing systems due in large part to the fact that MS-DOS dominated the early landscape of personal computing.  But the dominance of Windows (up until Google that is) is the API.  The APIs which enabled professional programmers to develop desktop applications on top of platforms (perhaps most notably the Microsoft Windows API), have now given way to APIs which feed off of the platform of the Internet.  And while Microsoft and the desktop are controlled by physical bodies, the Internet, despite the fact that certain companies do, in fact, oversee enormous pools of user data and have the ability to direct traffic as they see fit, is not governed by a particular body or set of bodies.  If the power flow of yesterday’s APIs was a vertical one, headed at top by the executives of companies like Microsoft, which allowed programmers to work off of their platform to develop applications to be used by the users at the  bottom, we might see the power flow of today’s APIs as closer to a horizontal one.   

Next:  The Thrilling Poverty of Physical Gestures

Ever wonder how algorithms threaten our identities?

Tune into AttentionGate, the new series from the folks that brought you Identity Theft

In the Arrival, the first episode in 1967 of the British TV show The Prisoner, Number 6 says:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.” 

If an algorithm is an operation that turns a certain input into an equally certain output, then it can be seen as expressing a unique and consistent identity.  The extent to which this algorithm, in trying to faithfully represent a pre-existing identity, in the process reduces that identity to something less than itself, then the algorithm no longer represents identity.  Instead, the algorithm disturbs, distorts and destroys the identity.  It becomes a new, different identity- maybe still disguised as the underlying, organic, authentic, original human identity but actually nothing more than a bionic simulation. 

When the input for an algorithm is the attention of the user, the success of the algorithm is based on its ability to record attention data at its original resolution, preserved in its original context.  For example, it’s not only the specific area of the page I was paying attention to, but who influenced me to go there in the first place.  The failure of attention algorithms to maintain this fidelity began with “My Tivo Thinks I am Gay”

In trying to correct the machine from thinking he was gay, Mr. Iwanyk “tried to tame TiVo’s gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”  His attempt to recalibrate the attention algorithm is too strong, and its starts to generate “documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann” as output.

The specter of the Holocaust casts its shadow once again.  Data costs merge into datacaust.  Before we had identity theft in the information world, we had
identity theft in the physical world.  This was not about stealing a
virtual identity, but about stealing physical bodies.  Removing human
expression (hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, social circle) and reducing
the individual to a single number was the best way to eliminate human identity without eliminating human productivity.

As the number of prisoners brought to the expanding Auschwitz
complex rose, so did the death rate. But if a corpse were separated
from its uniform, identification was rendered all but impossible. With
often hundreds of prisoners dying per day, other methods of
identification were needed… In May 1944, numbers in the "A" series
and the "B" series were first issued to  Jewish prisoners, beginning
with the men on May 13th and the women on May 16th. The "A" series was
to be completed with 20,000; however an error led to the women being
numbered to 25,378 before the "B" series was begun. The intention was
to work through the entire alphabet with 20,000 numbers being issued in
each letter series. In each series, men and women had their own
separate numerical series, ostensibly beginning with number 1…  from The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

 
Today, the seductiveness of Tivo has been eclipsed by the sensitive ears of search boxes.  Every interest is heard, every desire is remembered, every curiosity recorded on somebody else’s server.  In exchange for capturing all of this information, the search algorithm promises to return relevant links that deliver a profitable return on attention. 

When we wonder about the black box, and ask to see the wizard inside of an attention algorithm, invariably that black box opens up to reveal another one: at the same moment link-based algorithms are losing the battle against splogs and fraudulent clicks, personalized search emerges and seduces us effortlessly into a new attention algorithm; at least until people start wondering about the value of consuming their own personal attention residues and log out out from the platform.

Stay tuned for upcoming AttentionGate episodes on AOL search data and pretext surveillance at HP …