VerizonMath

VerizonMath

There is a rich poetry in the customer service call made to Verizon here: the poetry of cognitive implosion and obstinacy. A customer is repeatedly given a quote for ".002 cents per kilobyte" as the cost of roaming for his Verizon mobile data service, and is charged $.002 (that's .2 cents) per kilobyte instead.

It is likely that some of the customer service agents actually recognized the error, but are obliged to stonewall him in order to avoid a disastrous pay-out to all customers who received the same quote. I wonder what would happen if it reached the courts: just what kind of torturous logics would be invoked, and perhaps even institutionalized, to avoid the admission of error. Will the semantics of decimal numbers for currency be determined as exceptions from those for standard mathematics? From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, that's what is really going on. But my loyalties are to the aggrieved customer nonetheless.

Whitewashing the fence: sustainable clubs, Google image labeler, and work-power as an epiphenomenon.

THE CRITICAL MASS is a "sustainable dance club" which uses the kinetic energy of the visitors to power the club itself. The project is framed by its designers as a solution to the wastefulness of the traditional dance club; I see it as a kind of capture of surplus energy which is then transformed into a feedback system, creating game-able loops of information, particularly if - and this isn't clear - visitors can understand their collective agency, or even their contributive agency, to the ecosystem of the club.

A comparable project is the Google Image Labeler, a game which generates labor - specifically, the task of meta-tagging - as a by-product of a game of semantic coordination between strangers. Players get to accumulate points, Google gets thousands of images tagged without paying a dime for the labor. The labeler seems to have been targeted for abuse, however, perhaps sabotaging its value as a method of producing meta-data. One wonders whether the motivation is to game the system for more in-game points (intrinsic motivation), or if it is an attempt to engineer AdSense traffic results, as certain keywords may cause certain ads to be more likely to appear (extrinsic motivation.) Google is well-equipped to filter out the noise of the latter, of course; if the motivation is the former, however, and the enthusiasm of players who could produce "honest" results is dampened by their inability to compete with a tribe of keyword-sharers, then they may actually see a decline in benefit.