Wanted: professional sock puppets

Speaking of social media: Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain's Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media appears in today's Guardian. Here's the deal:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with the US Central Command (Centcom) to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities at once.

The contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.

Centcom's contract requires the provision of one "virtual private server" in the United States and eight appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world. It calls for "traffic mixing", blending the persona controllers' internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability".

Once developed the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of co-ordinated blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.

Will sock puppeteering replace phone sales as the new job for the desperate? A science fiction writer would like to know.

At any rate, please do read this piece and then Phoebe Connolly's How Social Media Is Science Fiction. I'd be very interested to hear what you'all think.

A lot of interesting mistakes

Phoebe Connolly's "How Social Media Is Science Fiction" reports on a recent panel discussion, conducted by Annalee Newitz, which included such sf luminaries as Maureen F. McHugh, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Anders. After noting that Matt Thompson posts "a spectrum that starts with collective intelligence, goes through social media and ends with AI," Connolly writes that Maureen McHugh interestingly

reminded the crowd of Robert Heinlein's definition of three levels of science fiction -- at the first level, we're inventors in the basement, at the second level we extrapolate an infrastructure and at the third level, we're positing changes in people's behaviors as a result of this changed world.

McHugh said we're well into the second level of abstraction in how we think about social media, but we're not yet into the third. Consider multitasking -- in general, we're still bad at it, as an MIT study recently demonstrated. "And we're freaked out. But Socrates was freaked out about literacy!" McHugh noted, and the result of literacy was a written record of history. The benefits we're going to gain from offloading part of our social interaction onto the net remain to be seen.

The discussion also talked about the apparently paradoxical shift away from allowing individuals to adopt multiple identities and keeping their Real Life identity private.

It's not just the conversation that we struggle to control online, it's our very avatars. "Part of being social animals is we construct identities," said [Matt] Thompson. Increasingly, our online avatars demand that our identities merge into one--we are asked to log-on to services using an existing Twitter or Facebook account, we're discouraged from interacting anonymously, be it on Craigslist or a discussion forum. This is a change from the fears about ourselves that we expressed in science fiction of say, the 1960s. Doris Lessing, to pick one example, took up this fear in The Golden Notebook. The novel's protagonist, Anna Wulf struggles with possessing multiple social identities.

Connolly's report ends with: "McHugh captured it best: "I think we're making a lot of interesting mistakes." You can read the entire geeky report here.