WikiLeaks, a wiki site that helps insid­ers release infor­ma­tion anony­mously, was in the news last month when its pri­mary domain name (wikileaks.org) was removed from the Domain Name System. A San Francisco judge ordered the move, which effec­tively made it impos­si­ble to reach any part of the wikileaks.org web­site directly. Fortunately for whistle­blow­ers world­wide, the site was still acces­si­ble via an alter­nate domain name -- wikileaks.be -- which was reg­is­tered in Belgium, and there­fore not sub­ject to injunc­tions from US judges. (Technically, it was also acces­si­ble by IP address for those moti­vated enough to bypass the DNS.)

Two weeks later, the judge reversed his own deci­sion, and wikileaks.org came back online. The case raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions, start­ing with, when you’re deal­ing with a wiki, who do you sue? The “owner” of the wikileaks.org domain is in Australia, the phys­i­cal servers are in Sweden and Belgium, and the con­trib­u­tors are anony­mous and unlogged. So, when the bank Julius Baer wanted to sue some­one for leak­ing inter­nal doc­u­ments, the only domes­ti­cally iden­ti­fi­able party was Dynadot, the San Mateo-based reg­is­trar of the wikileaks.org domain. (Of course, the bank’s approach back­fired, as it only drew more atten­tion to WikiLeaks -- and to Julius Baer’s alleged wrong­do­ings -- than ever before, which was exactly what they wanted to avoid. I, for one, had never heard of WikiLeaks before I heard about the case in the news.)

WikiLeaks is a case study in some­thing com­pletely new: a col­lec­tively authored pub­li­ca­tion where every con­trib­u­tor is fully anony­mous and untrace­able. At least one other site I’ve seen, Strictly No Photography, uses a sim­i­lar model to share pro­tected infor­ma­tion (pho­tos, in this case). It will be inter­est­ing to watch these mod­els evolve, pay­ing close atten­tion to how var­i­ous legal struc­tures react to them.

I’ve been look­ing into crowds and mobs, seek­ing to iden­tify ele­ments com­mon to pos­i­tive large-group expe­ri­ences. This week, I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy,” look­ing for answers.

During truly ecsta­tic events, par­tic­i­pants have the sen­sa­tion of merg­ing with the group, becom­ing part of a larger whole, and hav­ing the “expe­ri­ence of self-loss in the crowd.” With the tem­po­rary loss of indi­vid­ual iden­tity comes the tem­po­rary loss of indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­ity. Inhibitions are low­ered and moral judge­ment may be impaired, since “the crowd” acts as one force. This explains how ordi­nary, gen­er­ally moral peo­ple can riot, and how straight-laced con­ser­v­a­tives can let it all hang out at Mardi Gras. (Yes, alco­hol plays a role, too, accel­er­at­ing the low­er­ing of inhi­bi­tions and an increased sense of con­nec­tion with others.)

Ehrenreich observes that instances of col­lec­tive ecstasy are very much non-hierarchical:

Hierarchy, by its nature, estab­lishes bound­aries between people--who can go where, who can approach whom, who is wel­come, and who is not. Festivity breaks the bound­aries down. …

While hier­ar­chy is about exclu­sion, fes­tiv­ity gen­er­ates inclu­sive­ness. The music invites every­one to dance; shared food briefly under­mines the priv­i­lege of class. … At the height of the fes­tiv­ity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses--of gen­der, eth­nic­ity, tribe, and rank--and into a brief utopia defined by egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, cre­ativ­ity, and mutual love.

Ehrenreich refers to our mod­ern era as the “post­fes­tive” era, since cen­turies of hier­ar­chi­cal civ­i­liza­tion have all but elim­i­nated the class-undermining expres­sions of par­tic­i­pa­tory joy that threaten it.

Given that, how can we design expe­ri­ences of col­lec­tive joy for a post­fes­tive people?

During his pre­sen­ta­tion last week, Colin men­tioned his research into sus­tain­abil­ity and the cradle-to-cradle con­cept, specif­i­cally. I thought I’d share my recent expe­ri­ence with Green Phone, which I first heard about in this New York Times Magazine arti­cle in January. It’s an easy way to recy­cle old mobile devices -- and you get paid to do it. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to greenphone.com.
2. Tell them what model of phone you have, and set up an account.
3. They gen­er­ate a postage-paid mail­ing label for you. Print it out, and stick the label on a padded envelope.
4. Put your old phone and acces­sories in the enve­lope, and drop it off at the Post Office.
5. Wait a cou­ple weeks for them to receive and test your phone. If it’s in good work­ing con­di­tion, they’ll cut you a check! If not, well, they’ll recy­cle all the parts (includ­ing tox­ics, like mer­cury) and hey, no big loss on your part -- you didn’t even pay for postage!

I had an early RAZR and they cut me a check for $22. (It would’ve been $28, but the screen was dam­aged.) From my point of view, the best part is that they recy­cled all my use­less acces­sories, like the charger and ear­bud, which I could not have recy­cled myself locally.

Be sure to use my refer­ral code of 50957 to get a 10% bonus. (Just using the link above should work.)

These Mexican choco­late can­dies, in the style of M&Ms, have let­ters printed on them. Fortunately, although Lunetas Clásicas are set in the worst type­face ever, they taste fine!

A cou­ple weeks ago, my research into SMS as an inter­ac­tive medium led me to a friend of a friend who hap­pens to be named Brian House. Brian gra­ciously agreed to talk with me on the phone, and our con­ver­sa­tion val­i­dated a num­ber of ideas I had about SMS.

Brian’s most well-known project is called Yellow Arrow. Done in 2004, the project involved dis­trib­ut­ing thou­sands of yel­low arrow stick­ers, on each of which was printed a unique code. These stick­ers were sent all over the globe, where user-participants could stick them on sur­faces, point­ing to things of note. Then, by send­ing a text mes­sage with the arrow’s unique ID, the par­tic­i­pant would “reg­is­ter” a “mem­ory” or story about that place or object, such as “this is where we first kissed” or “this is the best chi­nese food in town.” Subsequent vis­i­tors can send in the same text code and will receive back the orig­i­nal story. Yellow Arrow was fea­tured in the recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA.

The real thing I wanted to talk to Brian about, though, was TXTML, a sys­tem he built as part of his Master’s the­sis that can be used to cre­ate “inter­ac­tive text-messaging appli­ca­tions.” I’m look­ing into doing some projects with SMS, and will be eval­u­at­ing TXTML for whether or not it would be a good tool for what I want to do. In short, it sounds like TXTML is great for cre­at­ing indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences and nar­ra­tives. Since it’s smarter than typ­i­cal SMS engines, it can remem­ber each user’s his­tory, and custom-tailor the inter­ac­tion for each indi­vid­ual. (For exam­ple, you text “I am Scott,” and it responds “Hello, Scott, I remem­ber that you like the color blue.”) It may not be suited to medi­at­ing the group expe­ri­ences that I want to design, but I can cer­tainly learn a lot just by work­ing with it.