Paolo's Solution

At dinner the other night, Paolo pointed out that while the US is budgeting $75+ billion for the war, Iraq's GDP is $60 billion. We could buy the entire country for less than it'll take to conquer it. (And does anyone believe the current budget figure?)

Apparently there's some footage of Bush trying out his firm-and-patriotic scowl before broadcasting his recent speech. It's been shown by the BBC and elsewhere, but not in the US. Does anyone have a link to it? (If this is currently the number one hit at blogdex, forgive my being so out of it. Damn vacation.)

From Florence

Finally found both time and a Net connection to update my blog! I'm in a Net cafe in Florence, two blocks from the Duomo, this big hunk of bricks with some art 'n' stuff inside it. It's been a great trip, but I'll spare you the details because I'm blogging it for the Boston Globe somewhere around here

I had dinner with Paolo and Monica Valdemarin in Venice, along with the other six members of my family traveling together. Paolo and I know each other through our weblogs and decided to meet in person. (We got a little encouragement from Marc Canter. Thanks, Marc!) We had a great time.

We talked about weblogs as building webs of trust. I met Paolo already knowing him through his weblog. I trusted him before I met him, and I had good reason to trust him. We were able to start talking as if we had been friends for months, which in a sense we had been. The Web is rewiring the real world. Just not fast enough. (Paolo blogged it and some pictures here.)

By the way, Paolo's Google URL is "paolo": that's all you need to search on in order to get his blog as the first hit on Google.

On a semi-related note, Paolo told me that he posted on his blog a few months ago that he'd like a Radio script that would return the first hit on Google for any selected text so that he could more easily link while writing his blog. Within a few hours, two readers had sent him such scripts, one in England and one in Italy. Pretty cool, both as a widget and as an example of the power of this Web thing.

From Venice

I just posted Friday's update on our trip to boston.com although it takes a couple of hours for the update to "take."

There are peace signs everywhere in this city. No other political signage, as far as I can tell.

From Venice

We're in Venice on vacation. I'm blogging it for the Boston Globe. We're counting on the second day being better than the first. Just a loooong, wearying day of travel.

By the way, the second blog entry on the Globe site is by my son, Nathan, 12. The Globe's going to update it to reflect that.

Bad, expensive AOL connection from the hotel room. 650 emails waiting. I think I'll flee the Net for the day.

Return to Campus

Returning to Bucknell to give a talk was unsettling. I haven't been back in 25 years and I've kept up only with a few friends. I was unhappy during college, and I have kept the lid of memories screwed on pretty durn tight.

I got a good education there. The teachers ranged from good to life-changing. But I didn't realize how isolated and privileged the experience was until I stepped back on campus. Has it become even more of a country club than when I was there? No way of telling. Statistically, of course, it's more diverse. Spiritually, I don't know.

My breakfast with Professors Fell and Sturm meant too much for me to write about. But I can give you their reading list.

Professor Fell recommends John William Miller, his own teacher. He gave me a copy of The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects. I started reading it on the way back. Chapter One is gibberish to me. Chapter Two affords me at least a handhold. I will go to the site that Prof. Fell recommended, hoping that it will give me enough context to begin to understand what the book is about. (The site links to Prof. Fell's exceptionally clear and helpful introductory essay on Miller.)

Professor Sturm recommends that I read Whitehead. I read Whitehead when I was an undergrad and maybe some more in grad school. Back then I read to conquer, to get Whitehead under my belt. (Talk about consumerism!) I read better now, but not well enough: I am still defensive, holding off ideas, maintaining my current beliefs. It's one reason among several that I could never be a genuine scholar.

I talked with my old professors about my interest in the idea that the universe might be a computer. Within 90 seconds, the conversation clarified a point for me that should have been apparent: The universe-as-computer idea does not imply a maker the way the universe-as-clockmaker idea does because the complexity of the universal clockworks makes the Argument from Design seem plausible while the point of the universal computer is that enormous complexity results from great simplicity.

Ok, so this is a big D'oh! But isn't so much of great teaching the revealing of the blindingly obvious?

I walked through Lewisburg two nights ago. I lived there for four years as a student and one year as a resentful day-laborer and bad writer.

Places change more slowly than we do. It doesn't seem fair.

As I strolled, nostalgia intermittently struck, like being pelted with rocks. I say with no pride that I oddly found myself most wanting to visit places where I had been most notably stoned way back then: Tommy T's apartment overlooking Market Street, the home goods store where I once spent too long watching skeins of yarn merging, the secluded point in the river behind the railroad tracks where we smoked freshman year when we thought we had to go a half mile into the woods to avoid detection.

I don't know why those were the memories most present. It felt more like the effect of brain chemistry than memory. Damn embarrassing.

Splash

Here are some more honest and enjoyable splash pages for well-known sites. (Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.)

Invasion

At the AT&T Wireless kiosk in Sunbury, PA, when I tried to buy a new cell phone charger for $14.95, I was told that the cash register wouldn't accept the transaction unless I gave them the phone number of my cell phone.

Fortunately, (617) 555 1212 was acceptable to the cash register when the cashier grudgingly entered it.

"It's not an invasion of privacy," she called after me as I left, genuinely wounded that I had insulted the integrity of AT&T Wireless.

PC Forum Wiki - The Semantic Mess

I'm finding the PC Forum Wiki a good way to catch up on what's going on at that conference.

And I was glad to read Sergey Brin of Google taking on Tim Berners-Lee's idea for the semantic web. It's the battle between order and mess, and messiness not only will win, we're better off for it. I mean, if the early browsers only read well-formed and valid HTML, the Web would be far neater, one-thousandth the size, and lifeless.

[Thanks to the people contributing to the Wiki. Here's an enhancement request that I know is counter to the wiki culture: I personally like it when the primary author of a page notes that fact. I don't even know who to thank for most of the work!]

TrackBack Explained

Aha! Ben and Mena have posted a step-by-step guide to TrackBack.

Thanks!

Breakfast

I am giving a talk at Bucknell University, from which I was graduuated in 1972. I haven't been back in 25 years.

This morning I had breakfast with the two teachers who had the biggest influence on my intellectual development, JP Fell and Douglas Sturm.

It was for me a moving event. I may write about it more, or I may not.

Spectrum Policy

Donna Wentworth is blogging a conference on spectrum policy. She has complete notes of Larry Lessig interviewing Yochai Benckler. She points out that it's also being webcast.

[I'm on the road again today. Light blogging ahead.]

Operation Random Appellation

Operation Irate Fatwa
Operation Thin-skinned Privet Bush
Operation Very Hungry Beaver
Operation Choleric Hajj
Operation Cowboy Bird of Prey
Operation Trigger-happy Girlfriend
Operation Wrathful Button
Operation Sexually Ambiguous Griffin
Operation Platinum Centaur
Operation Spitting Uniform
Operation Infuriated Justice
Operation Brave Wombat
Operation Leather Tension
Operation Famous Sucker Punch
Operation Wild Republican Administration
Operation Wraithlike Typhoon
Operation Destructive Rottweiler
Operation Smite the Gecko
Operation Humane Crusade
Operation Screaming Cannon

These are from a random US Operation name generator. (Pointed out by Gary Stock.)

TrackBack in Words and Pictures

Michael d'Cruftbox has posted an exceptionally clear "How To" for Trackback newbies.

Some Facts

Robert Fisk of the UK's The Independent reports on civilian casualties from a Baghdad hospital.

If a war is justified, then the inevitable and inadvertent killing of children is also justified. And pointing to a hurt child by itself isn't an argument against a war. I know that. Nevertheless, these children are facts just like the other sorts of facts we're being shown 24/7: the government buildings on fire, the incoming missiles shot down, the ring of fire lit around the city.

We don't have to linger on these particular little facts. They don't have to change our minds. But they should at least remind us not to cheer when we see the Baghdad night lit up.

Venice and Florence

On Wednesday, 7 of us - my wife and two children, my in-laws and my sister-in-law - will be going to Venice and Florence for a week. That is, 3.5 days in each. I've been to Venice and Florence a few times, but if you have favorite places other than the Big Tourist Spots, want to let me know? (If you recommend restaurants, keep in mind that 4 of us are vegetarians and don't eat fish.)

TIA, which used to mean Thanks In Advance before it meant Total Information Awareness.

By the way, I'll be blogging it for the Boston Globe. Details soon.

Dash on TrackBack

Anil Dash has written some notes on TrackBack for Dummies (i.e., me and Doc). He gives some idea of the power of TB beyond just noting who's linked to a blog entry, capabilities AKMA reports Ben and Mena Trott also tout. Very helpful.

Growing up or closing down?

This morning I woke up once again hoping to hear that Hussein is dead.

I am disturbed by my callousness. Up through my 'twenties, I would have reminded myself that all life is precious and would have dredged up some sympathy for Hussein. I could probably still do it. I could get there by thinking about how his children would — will — react to his death. But it'd be a real effort. And it no longer seems helpful or important.

In fact, in hoping that Hussein is dead, I'm also acknowledging that I'd be willing to kill him. That's not to say that I can imagine sneaking through Baghdad and pulling a trigger. But, I'd take my failure to kill him if given the opportunity to be moral weakness.

So, here's my question: When I was in my 'twenties, I'd have to work myself into feeling sympathy for someone like Hussein. Now I have to work myself into feeling bad about not feeling sympathy for someone like him. Is my callousness a sign that I'm making moral progress or that I'm slipping into the comfortable certitude of middle age?

Operation Iraqi Fiefdom

<eob>

Doing something, anything

MoveOn.org is recommending that we give to Oxfam to help rebuild what we are at this instant destroying - although, of course, what most needs to be rebuilt never can be.

Oxfam is at the top of my family's giving list. We give every month automatically, and when I once upon a time made some money at a dot-com, we tithed to Oxfam. It's a good group doing good works.

MoveOn writes:

The Bush administration has shown that it has a very short attention span on post-conflict humanitarian efforts. The White House didn't request a single dollar for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan in this year's budget -- Congress had to take the unusual step of adding in $300 million.

Shock and Awe

It's beginning. I feel I am going to puke. I am keeping a trash bin next to me as I type this.

Why should we Americans even have to contemplate the possibility that a massive crime is being carried out in our name?

Groups! Help!

At the O'Reilly conference on emerging technology I agreed to talk about "the future of groups." How the hell would I know? So, I'm turning to you. I just want enough to stimulate a discussion, so all I need from you is 20 minutes worth of brilliant insights that are staggeringly fresh, indisputable, and vastly amusing.

Here are the sorts of things I've been thinking about:

The Eskimos may have 35 words for snow (they don't, and they're not called Eskmos any more), but we have 100 words for groups. (Note, we also have 100 words for dirt.) But we don't have good words for what we do online together. This is part of a general trend: as computing enters new phases, it takes over old words and stretches them beyond recognition: information, documents, and now communities. It's actually the concepts that are being stretched, of course.

Groups vs. groupings. A grouping is a set of people who are unknowingly lumped together for some third party's purpose: a demographic is a grouping. A group consist of people who have clustered themselves. The Internet gives dominance to groups over groupings.

Why the word "community" is wrong for most of what's on the Net. A community is a group of people who care about one another more than they have to. That certainly occurs on the Net, but not always. In fact, the ease of virtual group-forming means that there are many more ecological niches that are being filled in the social ecology. E.g., membership in RW groups used to be required because of problems scaling meetings; now membership often plays a different role, if it's required at all. Maybe do a 3-D matrix and suggest unfilled niches. (If that doesn't work, maybe show "The Matrix" in 3D.)

Groups are at the heart of the Internet's value. (See Reed's Law vs. Mecalfe's Law.) Yet the Internet doesn't look like groups, with a few exceptions (mailing lists, buddy lists). Myopia rules. I can't see the web of people who whom I've sent out email. We can't even do anything with the rich social web created by second degree buddy lists. What would the Internet look like if we looked at it from the group point of view? Answer: I dunno.

Why hasn't word of mouth done even better on the Net? We have generalized sites (epinions, Amazon) but not among friends and not for geographic localities. (Note: I've started failed businesses to address these so-called opportunities.)

I don't want to look like a moron in front of an audience of my betters! Hellllllp!

Recommended Disagreements

Arnold Kling disagrees with me about anonymity.

Norman Mailer is back in form as a psycho-mytho-political commentator.

You tell me: Is this Web design firm's home page the worst professionally designed Web site you've seen? Or do I just not appreciate de Modern Stijl?

Refocusing Peace

Grant Henninger is suggesting that the peace movement refocus its message since obviously we're not going to prevent the war. Instead, Grant suggests, we should focus on limiting civilian casualties and ensuring that we step up to our responsibility to rebuild Iraq afterwards.

I'm in favor of both of Grant's points, but I think there is a point to continuing to protest the war itself: It tells the government that we don't all fall into a line when a war is declared, and it tells the world that not all Americans believe this war is worth the death and instability it will bring.

Nevertheless, I think Grant raises a point worth discussing.

After the War

When I was 12, I remember listening in my bedroom for sirens to tell me that soon I'd be inhaling the radiated dust that once was New York City 15 miles away. The US Navy was going to intercept Russian ships suspected of transporting nuclear missiles to Cuba. The Russians would either allow us to board or they would fight back, likely escalating quickly into a "nuclear exchange."

The Russians "blinked." Kruschev didn't have JFK's balls. (The fact that we actually did a deal with him — we agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey on his border — didn't emerge until years later.)

We won and we learned the wrong lessons. We are going to win in Iraq and we will also learn the wrong lessons.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was only a crisis because we made it one. Having nuclear missiles in Cuba did not affect our national security one iota. Soviet subs armed with nuclear missiles patrolled our shores, so why did it matter that there were a handful more nukes 90 miles away? The presence of Cuban missiles only meant that Miami might be vaporized 8 minutes sooner than New York. The deterrent to any attack remained the 28,000 nuclear weapons we had dispersed around the world.

The Cuban missile crisis was our fault. It was reckless. It was machismo that put the world at risk. Thank God Kruschev didn't have JFK's balls. In fact, the Cuban missile crisis is the best argument in history against balls.

But, we learned from it that playing chicken "works." We learned that threatening to end life on the planet is an effective way of getting what you want. We escalated the arms race — it was JFK, after all, who campaigned by making up a "missile gap" — to heights that almost bankrupted us before it bankrupted the Soviet Union. The real lesson should have been, IMO, that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to use except for deterrence. And if deterrence was our goal, we only needed a few subs swimming deep under water.

Now we are going to win another fight; we would turn the desert to glass before we would lose. And the lesson we'll draw from this is that it's honorable to be willing to wage war alone, that war works, that the UN doesn't, that we are not secure unless every risk is removed, that peace means no strife or disagreement, that strength means power and that restraining from the use of violence is weakness.

Each of these lessons is wrong. The world will be more dangerous because of it.

And there's not a thing we can do about it. It'd be like suggesting that the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't really an American triumph at all.

Peace Swarm

Here's a little experiment in social software.

I've been talking with Jack Bury, a 20-year-old American poet living in Amsterdam, who is part of a tiny start-up trying to get some traction for "Eyebees," a Microsoft IE add-in. (It'll be open sourced eventually.) The add-in puts a frame on the left of your browser that shows you up to 200 little dots (Eyebees), each representing another person in the "swarm" you've joined. Their relative position shows which pages they're currently viewing. If a few people are each looking at, say, Doc's blog, then you'll see the five Eyebees clustered together; clicking on any of them loads the page they're looking at. You can also send a message to any of the Eyebees visible in the panel. Cool idea.

So, Jack is proposing that at noon EST tomorrow (Friday), we do a "peace swarm," i.e., a bunch of people who are sorry about the war we've started will all click on the appropriately-named swarm at www.eyebees.com and we'll browse around together. So, if you wanna hang out for a bit tomorrow, download the software and join the swarm.

And now for the main question this raises to me: Why can't I be a 20-year-old poet living in Amsterdam? Please?

This just in ...

Breaking News
Save Over 40% on Intel CPUs!

Look, TigerDirect, you're a fine discounter, but please don't send me any more email with "Breaking News" in the subject unless there's some actual goddamn news in it like a cure for ebola, Ireland rotating 15 degrees clockwise, or President Bush's succubus emerging and announcing that it's worn out and is taking a few days off.

Iraqi Blog

This blog from Baghdad is must-read for two reasons. First, it will tell you more about what the coming war feels like than 24 hours of network babble. Second, it is a vivid example of why blogging matters.

(Thanks to Kathy Quirk for the link.)

Buy a Dixie Chicks Album for Freedom

The Dixie Chicks' album is plummeting because they are being kept off the air for saying what many of us feel. I myself am about to buy muh very first Dixie Chicks CD.

You can get their new one, Home, for $14.00 plus shipping at their web site.

Democracy is a conversation

From William Du Bois, from a mailing list I'm on:

Bush's Utopian Plan for Peace and mine differ at the core.

Hal Pepinsky, one of the founders of peacemaking criminology, talks about the dynamics of democracy and violence.

He defines democracy as responsiveness — we take each other into account. We may not change our agenda but we take what the Other has to say into account. Violence is the opposite of democracy. It is asserting your own will and refusing to take the other into account...

Equity, Ambivalence, and Bombing for Peace

You know how the NY Times wrote a few hundred words about each and every person who died in the attack on the World Trade Center? Suppose the Times were to accord each Iraqi civilian we kill the same dignity. Of course the Iraqi victims will be unintended casualties, unlike those who died on 9/11. But, they are predictable unintended casualities, so why not remind us of the price of victory? Why not remind us that an Iraqi father searching for his child in the rubble is no different from my friend who waited for a phone call from his son who worked in the Towers? Are Iraqi lives really not worth the ink? Or our attention?

Wouldn't such coverage help tell the world what sort of people we Americans are?

The bumpersticker "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity" pisses me off because it glosses over the hard question: Is this particular war worth fighting? Will it create a more peaceful world once the bombs stop turning people into red mist? That's the difficult discussion we need to be having. My answer is: No! But not because bombing is always illogical the way fucking for virginity is always self-contradictory. I'm not a pacifist, so I think sometimes bombing makes sense. Our challenge is to figure out when. This bumpersticker doesn't help.

Here is my new bumpersticker. I'm not satisfied with the wording, though. Any suggestions?

Hank Blakely Will Continue to Be Funny

Hank Blakely of Dystopical has decided to continue his weekly comments on the Bush administration. Hank's writing is funny the way Delft is blue.

He reports this week that he was going to suspend operations during the upcoming carnage, but his wife convinced him that this is precisely the wrong time for critics to go silent.

Good.

New issue of JOHO

I've published a new issue of JOHO, my free newsletter:

The Value of Gray

I wish that Bush were strong enough to admit ambivalence. But he's not. He has the courage granted by a big rare-wood desk.

Two on Bush and Iraq

Niek Hockx giving one Dutch citizen's despairing reaction to Bush's cowboy ultimatum last night: "Evil is out of its cage."

Steve Kirsch on The Five Lessons of 911.

Anti-Spam Centers

Eric passes along this article about ending spam by altering the terms of the Internet, something World of Ends recommends against unless the new agreement is genuinely in the interests of the users. In this case, the group discussing changes to SMTP has been convened by the group that created SMTP 20 years ago.

Translanting

I blogged that the Google translation of a French article on World of Ends said that the piece is "corrosive and didactic." Kenneth Powers writes from Spain:

As a professional (i.e. I generally get paid for it) translator, I am happy to see that I will not be out of a job for some time yet. I would recommend the translation "scathing and educational", and yes, I would say they liked it, as did I. Of course, given the roots of the term "Mordant", they could be saying "it bites", translation is such an uncertain science, :)

Too bad. I sort of liked being corrosive and dictactic at the same time.

Loose Joins

Ben Hammersley, noting that a change in one site's query parameters broke another's plug-in, writes:

The trouble with small pieces loosely joined is that if one goes, the others look really silly

True enough. And since the initial site's change actually broke Ben's page, we can all Feel His Pain. But remember the old tightly coupled days when we thought that CORBA was going to provide the Nirvana of inter-application integration? Tight coupling works if everyone agrees to it ahead of time, but no one does, so it doesn't.

As Jonathan says:

While the distributed, loosely-coupled nature of the web is good for innovation, the dependency on others for correct function is bad...

Jonathan concludes: "...on a personal level the interconnectedness is a mess that frankly I can't see the end of."

Obviously, there are ways we can make the loose coupling less fragile: registries, for example. But the Web is always going to be a little bit broken, as Tim Berners-Lee supposedly said. That leaves a whole lot of ways in which the Web works surprisingly well.

Trackback Wha'?

It's good to be joined in befuddlement by none other than the Docster. He, too, can't figure out Trackback.

I've got the general idea. I just can't figure out how to get it working in Movable Type. Maybe someone should write a "Trackback for Dummies" and post it. And, please, only use small words.

Thank you.

Bray on Comcast

Tim Bray, one of the fathers of XML, blogs about the NY Times reporting that Comcast is going to add services to its delivery of broadband. Tim knocks 'em upside the head:

Let's lay it out in maximally-simple bullet-point form so anyone can understand it:

Fast pipe.

Always on.

Get out of the way.

You can't get much clearer than that.

Swarming for Peace

Jack Bury, a 20-year old poet, is co-creator of a Microsoft IE add-in called Eyebees. If you join a "swarm" - people interested in the same topic - the add-in shows you the movement of all other swarm members as they go from site to site. Click on one of the dots representing a swarm member and you are taken to whatever site they're visiting. It's a visceral visual experience.

To join the peace swarm, download the Eyebees software from www.eyebees.com and join the "Eyebees March on Washington" swarm (under the category of "The Rally") at Eyebees.com. Jack is suggesting that Friday at noon EST might be a good time to flock together for peace.

This software is way new. There have been a handful of downloads so far. So if you don't see anyone in the Peace Swarm, check back later.

Writes Jack: "The enveloping presence of thousands of minds, tracing across the Internet Sky in strange union - hissing and livid and one in censure of war - would be a conspicuous, awe-inspiring sight of this next social revolution taking firm hold."

John has told Doc that he plans to open source Eyebees. Good move. That's the only way to get an idea like this off the ground.

Startup Web Sites

What's your favorite web site by and for a startup? Who's done a great job presenting themselves when there are only five people in the company and one of them is a cat? I have some friends more or less in that situation who are looking for ideas and lessons...

Great SXSW blogging

Because my brain gears slipped, I just got around to Heath Rows fantabulous blogging from the SXSW conference. You'll find near-transcripts and commentary. Wow. Here and here.

Norlin on digID

Eric has created a white paper on why digital ID matters and why PingID (the paper's sponsor) gets it right. It's well written and lays out the issues clearly. Nice job, Eric.

Eric certainly makes the case that a federated approach is preferable to a centralized one, but I remain unconvinced that the drawbacks of having any Net-wide digID are worth the benefits. But, Eric would say: Tough. DigID is happening, so you'd better pick the approach that's more user-centered. Yeah, probably. But this remains one bandwagon I think I'd rather be dragged behind than hop on board. ("World of Ends" is interesting co-reading.)

WSJ: Wrong on Spectrum

David Isenberg just called to tell me that there's an article on the first page of Section B of the Wall Street Journal today about how we're running out of spectrum.

What, you mean my article in Salon about David Reed's ideas didn't settle this question once and for all?

Aaarrrggghhhh!

The Day before the War

A haiku:

Winding in the kite,
it pulls up so hard, it writes
a line in my skin.

Corrosive and Didactic Ends

Christophe Ducamp points to an article on World of Ends on the site of a French TV network. Google's automatic translation service tells me that the author finds our article "corrosive and didactic," although as far as I can tell, between the rest of Google's translation and my limited French, they actually sort of like it.

Lessig on Open Spectrum

There's an excellent article on Open Spectrum by Sir Lawrence Lessig. For example:

Property systems are not free. To make sense, their benefits must outweigh their costs. Party members count two sorts of benefits from a property regime. The first is coordination?making sure that users of the spectrum don't conflict with each other. The second is allocation?making sure that the right to use a bit of spectrum is given to the highest valued user. Both benefits are indeed important. Yet both come at a cost. And if we could achieve at least some of these benefits without suffering the worst of these costs, then the gain from propertizing spectrum becomes harder to justify.

Tom on Community Writing

Tom gets at something true in his blogging about writing that creates a sense of community. It's the sort of thing you think you must have always known even though you didn't until you read it.

I'mn being interviewed at The Well

I'm the subject of an open interview at The Inkwell.vue. We're mainly talking about Small Pieces and I'm braying like a puffed-up, vacuous ass. Come join the fun!

Disagreeing to Agree

Frank Field, in worrying about one of Arnold Kling's points in his extension of World of Ends (Frank thinks that "Intermediaries add vaue" needs to be amended to say that they sometimes add value and users should be able to disintermediate themselves), points to a really good example of how to violate the End-to-End principle: an article at InternetNews.com says that the next version of Microsoft Office will require users to lock into Windows XP in order to get the benefits of the new release. Forced agreements aren't agreements.

Mike O'Dell, Finder of Funny Sites, recommends Ridiculopathy, an Onion-esque offering that today features a gleeful announcement by Microsoft that the new version of Office won't be compatible even with itself.

And while we're at, this issue of The Onion is pretty funny. I enjoyed the article about Ted Turner sending himself back in time to prevent the AOL merger with Time-Warner — it's not just the premise that's funny. And I also liked the one on the accidental funding of the arts...up to and including the last line.

Grimmelmann on DRM

James Grimmelmann at LawMeme shows the rest of us how to blog a conference. His report on the Boalt Digital Rights Management Conference is brilliant: hugely informative and entertaining. Anyone affected by DRM (i.e., everyone) should read it. (Thanks to Arnold Kling for the link.)

World of Ands

Michael O'Connor Clarke amends World of Ends to World of Ands. And it's quite lovely.

Nice writing. Brave, too.

Are There Ends on the Internet?

A few of the bloggers writing so well about the role of individual and community take Doc and me to task (or, better, to school) for portraying the Internet as a world of ends when in fact those ends are joined in webs of personal connection.

Of course that's right. And since Doc is the "Web is a conversation" guy and I'm the "Small pieces loosely joined" guy, we're on record as agreeing with that insight. So why do we misleadingly talk about "ends" in World of Ends? Good question...

First, that's the language in the paper from which we took the article's main insight: "End-to-End Arguments..." Second, Doc and I wanted to talk about the Internet's architecture so that we could make the quasi-factual claim that boneheaded businesses and regulators are just plain wrong in their understanding; we didn't want to focus in this article on all the good things that come out of that architecture. Third, we liked the echo of "ends" vs. "means" as in Kant's Kingdom of Ends.

But, yes, absolutely and definitely, the value of the Internet is the groups it allows. In fact, point #7 is called "The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends" and says in the first paragraph: "...when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren?t endpoints at all. " There's much much more to be said about this. Books and generations worth. But that wasn't the point of "World of Ends."

I find David Reed's apparent development on this issue interesting. He was one of the authors of the End-to-End argument. Thinking about the Net purely as a set of isolated ends leads to Metcalfe's Law that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes. This works fine for the telephone network. But, Reed realized, it seriously underestimates the value of a network where groups can form. So, Reed's Law accounts for the exponential increase in the number of possible groups each additional node causes, resulting in a much steeper curve than Metcalfe's. (I wrote about this here.)

Death of an Alpha Male

Halley today continues her descent into the heart of the alpha. The series started out as scandalously entertaining. It continues to grow and deepen.

AKMA reflects beautifully on the essay and points us to Trevor's commentaries on the impossibility of individuality outside of community. It's a deep thread well worth following.

We Are Waging Peace

Gary Lawrence Murphy sent out this meme-ful piece that's circulating on the Net:

Waging Peace in the world -

Dr. Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations, now Chancellor emeritus of the University of Peace in Costa Rica was one of the people who witnessed the founding of the U.N. and has worked in support of or inside the U.N. ever since. Recently he was in San Francisco to be honored for his service to the world through the U.N. and through his writings and teachings for peace. At age eighty, Dr. Muller surprised, even stunned, many in the audience that day with his most positive assessment of where the world stands now regarding war and peace.

I (do not know how the original person is) was there at the gathering and I myself was stunned by his remarks. What he said turned my head around and offered me a new way to see what is going on in the world. My synopsis of his remarks is below:

"I'm so honored to be here," he said. "I'm so honored to be alive at such a miraculous time in history. I'm so moved by what's going on in our world today." (: I was shocked. I thought — Where has he been? What has he been reading? Has he seen the newspapers? Is he senile? Has he lost it? What is he talking about?)

Dr. Muller proceeded to say, "Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war".

The whole world is in now having this critical and historic dialogue — listening to all kinds of points of view and positions about going to war or not going to war. In a huge global public conversation the world is asking- "Is war legitimate? Is it illegitimate? Is there enough evidence to warrant an attack? Is there not enough evidence to warrant an attack? What will be the consequences? The costs? What will happen after a war? How will this set off other conflicts? What might be peaceful alternatives? What kind of negotiations are we not thinking of? What are the real intentions for declaring war?"

All of this, he noted, is taking place in the context of the United Nations Security Council, the body that was established in 1949 for exactly this purpose. He pointed out that it has taken us more than fifty years to realize that function, the real function of the U.N. And at this moment in history— the United Nations is at the center of the stage. It is the place where these conversations are happening, and it has become in these last months and weeks, the most powerful governing body on earth, the most powerful container for the world's effort to wage peace rather than war. Dr. Muller was almost in tears in recognition of the fulfillment of this dream.

We are not at war," he kept saying. We, the world community, are WAGING peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before - never in human history - and it is happening now - every day every hour - waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on. "We're in peacetime," he kept saying. "Yes, troops are being moved. Yes, warheads are being lined up. Yes, the aggressor is angry and upset and spending a billion dollars a day preparing to attack. But not one shot has been fired. Not one life has been lost. There is no war. It's all a conversation."

It is tense, it is tough, it is challenging, AND we are in the most significant and potent global conversation and public dialogue in the history of the world. This has not happened before on this scale ever before - not before WWI or WWII, not before Vietnam or Korea, this is new and it is a stunning new era of Global listening, speaking, and responsibility.

In the process, he pointed out, new alliances are being formed. Russia and China on the same side of an issue is an unprecedented outcome. France and Germany working together to wake up the world to a new way of seeing the situation. The largest peace demonstrations in the history of the world are taking place — and we are not at war! Most peace demonstrations in recent history took place when a war was already waging, sometimes for years, as in the case of Vietnam.

"So this," he said, "is a miracle. This is what "waging peace " looks like."

No matter what happens, history will record that this is a new era, and that the 21st century has been initiated with the world in a global dialogue looking deeply, profoundly and responsibly as a global community at the legitimacy of the actions of a nation that is desperate to go to war.

Through these global peace - waging efforts, the leaders of that nation are being engaged in further dialogue, forcing them to rethink, and allowing all nations to participate in the serious and horrific decision to go to war or not.

Dr. Muller also made reference to a recent New York Times article that pointed out that up until now there has been just one superpower - the United States, and that that has created a kind of blindness in the vision of the U.S. But now, Dr. Muller asserts, there are two superpowers: the United States and the merging, surging voice of the people of the world.

All around the world, people are waging peace. To Robert Muller, one of the great advocates of the United Nations, it is nothing short of a miracle and it is working.

Ask Not for Whom the Spam Tolls

Arnold Kling wonders at Corante how The World of Ends idea applies to spam:

The World of Ends would seem to imply that the only weapon against spam is end-user filtering.  Any attempt to stop spam at the network level would require opening up packets and looking at them, which violates the world-of-ends principle

Instead, he suggests:

It is almost impossible to enforce a law against sending spam.  So we should try to pass a law against responding to spam.

What I propose is that any American who makes a purchase based on unsolicited email be fined $10,000 and jailed for 30 days. 

This is reminiscent of Chris Rock's suggestion that we make guns freely available but charge heavily for ammunition: If I want to shoot you, I'll first have to come up with $5,000 for a bullet.

But the World of Ends principle — which comes straight from the End-to-End argument by Clark, Reed and Salzer, and from Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network — doesn't say that no services can ever be built into a network, only that it's generally better to move services closer to the edge. So, as Arnold suggests, perhaps that means that spam needs to be trapped by the ISPs. I don't know if that's the case, but it could be.

Meanwhile, Popfile continues to work well for me here on my end of the Internet. I still have to look through the folder it filters spams into because about 1% are false positives, which means that a solution that works now when I'm getting about 250 spams a day may not work in a couple of years when may be getting 25,000 spams a day. Sigh.

Links with Value

Kevin Marks proposed to the emergent democracy list yesterday a way to flag that just because we're linking to something doesn't mean we agree with it. Among the benefits, this would give Google and other apps that count links a way to judge whether the link should count as a recommendation.

After we kicked it around for a while — wondering, for example, whether it should take a binary value or a range and whether we should call it "whuffie" — Kevin formulated the proposal. We're calling it "vote links" (not my favorite since voting is just one application) and it's simplicity itself: you optionally add "vote=X" to any link, where X can be "1", "-1" or "0". To take Kevin's example:

<a href="http://ragingcow.com" vote="-" title="nasty corn syrup drink">Raging Cow</a>

The best place for info is Kevin's site where he has a discussion and links to other list members' blog entries.

US to Invade The Netherlands

According to Human Rights Watch, in order to protect US soldiers from being brought to justice for any war crimes they may commit, Bush has signed (well, last August) a new law that

... authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the [International Criminal] court, which is located in The Hague.

Since the Hague (or "den Haag" as those beastly Dutch refer to it) is in the Netherlands, this has stirred up some consternation. Dutch blogger and future enemy soldier, Niek Hockx, has blogged about this amusingly.

In protest of Holland's outrageous aiding and abetting of The Hague, I pledge that from now on, when my girlfriend and I each pay our own way, I will refer to it as "going freedom." Also, I'll refer to the tree blight as "Freedom Elm Disease." That that, Wooden Shoe Legal Pot boy!

Kling's World of Intermediaries

Arnold Kling has written a terrific piece that tries to cure the geek version of the "Repetitive Mistake Syndrome" (Doc's phrase) Doc and I talk about WRT to suits in World of Ends. Arnold's five points are:

1. Intermediaries add value
2. Property is not evil
3. Computer animation is not a killer app
4. Bashing Microsoft does not make you smart 5. Markets are not exploitative

Anyone Know a Writer at SNL?

David Deans responds via email to my pointing out the implicit difference between Tony Blair's ability to handle himself in the House of Commons question period and George Bush's tranq-ed out performance art piece euphemistically called a "press conference":

On the lighter side of the issue — imagine this as a potential sketch for Saturday Night Live!Blair takes a "sick day," and invites Bush to step in for him at Parliament, by answering questions regarding the rationale for the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Against the advice of Cheney and others, Bush agrees.

Brilliant!

If you know a writer at Saturday Night Live, how about passing this along to her/him?

Your Daily Euphemism

When I was in Austin earlier this week, I asked the woman at the front desk of the Radisson if there were any movie theaters nearby.

"Well," she said, conflict playing over her face, "there's one. But it doesn't have stadium seating."

"Huh?" I replied, "That's not a requirement."

"Um, well, it just has regular seating."

"I'm ok with that."

Pause as she screws up the courage to blurt: "It's not in a good part of town."

Aha! The light goes on. I don't know if this was a race thing, a socio-economic thing, both or neither, but clearly "stadium seating" was the name of a truck carrying some hidden cargo.

Random Acts of JD

JD Lasica talks about blogging as "random acts of journalism." Good phrase, good thoughts.

Ambivalent but Not Undecided

I got asked on a mailing list why my views on the Iraqi war are so simplistic and one-sided. Ouch! Here's how I replied:

Like many people, I'm ambivalent about it. I am completely suspicious of the actual motives of the Bush administration and don't trust the information it's providing. But I don't need Bush to tell me that Saddam is a horror that we should never have supported in the first place. That doesn't necessarily mean that this war is the best way to get rid of him: the carnage may be too high, the final outcome may be worse for the Iraqis, the region may become embroiled in war, Hussein may destroy Israel and Boston on his way out, we may unilaterally destroy the alliances and goodwill towards us that has made the world safer, and IMO we are likely to start a 100 years war against a terrorist movement that is strengthened and emboldened by our attack. How many American cities are you prepared to lose in retaliation for this war?

Note the "may's" and "if's." It could all go great and none of the bad things may happen. I believe that, which is why I'm ambivalent. Ambivalent but not undecided.

Finally, my best guess about why Bush has rummaged through every possible justification for going to war is that we really want to show the world that we are in charge: we are the only superpower and we are willing to use our power. John Perry Barlow says that everyone gets out of the way of the driver who's unpredictably weaving down the road, and the Iraq war is intended to show that we are willing to intervene unpredictably. But bringing peace through power works only so long as the bad guys can't get their hands on any boxcutters. Our only hope for long-term safety, IMO, is to live in the world generously, building bridges and trust by showing the generous and loving side of the American character. So, even if all goes perfectly with the war, it will (I'm afraid) establish a policy that I think makes us and our children far less safe.

Notice that I haven't mentioned WMD. I personally don't believe that the war has even the slightest thing to do with that.

AIDS Photographs

If you want your heart to break, view the photos (as a QuickTime slideshow) that Kristen Ashburn took in Zimbabwe.

"Myth of Interference" Slashdotted

About 475 comments so far at slashdot on my Salon article about David Reed's ideas about Open Spectrum.

VidBlog

Michael Pusateri, whom I met at sxsw and who helped connect me to an smtp server (thanks, Mike), points us to a vidblog at unrelatednews. The vidblogger writes:

All in all it was fun to try it out. With the shooting/capture/edits/compression taking just over 15 minutes per clip to get done, it was not bad. If you are just doing one or two it'll be fine. But it still took too long for it to be a realistic thing to do everyday. Until there's an easier way to streamline the process I'll keep this idea as a fun little thing I'll do every now and then.

(I couldn't get the audio to work. Damn Intermenet!)

SXSW Tuesday Morning 2: Cory and Bloggers

Cory Doctorow is talking about the Hollywood Agenda. (His desktop wallpaper is Dr. Bonner's label, a psychotic babble of philosophy, scripture and self-improvement aphorisms.) Cory says: The role of technology is to create opportunities for the entertainment industry. The entetainment industry's role is to seek legislation that will close down those opportunities. From piano rolls to TV to Napster, that's been the story.

Factoid: "If you were to tape digital movies and use Fedex to ship them to your friends, it would be about 100x less expensive than shipping them to your friend over the Net." Even at the fastest connection speeds, it'd take several days to move a movie. So, Hollywood's belief that it's a threat is overblown.

The most important theme in Cory's talk: Hollywood does not want us to have general purpose computing devices. The "broadcast flag" bit the FCC is considering would only work if all digital tech supports it and if device that don't — like the computer you're reading this on — are outlawed because they don't support it.

Because I was session hopping, I missed the second half. The first half was Totally Cory: brilliant, funny, entertaining, right.

Really interesting panel on the future of blogging that I joined late. Paul Bausch (Blogger), Anil Dash (dashes.com), Justin Hall (links.net), Ben Trott (Movable Type), Mena Trott, moderator (Movable Type). I'm sitting on the floor and can't see who is talking. But here are the topics being discussed:

Personal aggregators that help us read thousands of weblogs.

The price we pay by aggregating: the loss of context.

"The focus on [Clay Shirky's] Power Law stuff drives me nuts. I have sites I don't want to be popular."

Good session.

[I'm back from SXSW now.]

My article on David Reed is in Salon

Salon today is running "The Myth of Interference," an article I wrote about David Reed's idea that the federal policies intended to prevent radio signals from interfering are based on bad science.

Ban Blair

If I were George Bush, I'd have Tom Ridge immediately block all broadcasts of Tony Blair's question time in the House of Commons. The implicit comparison is just too painful.

More on World of Ends

Paul Boutin has run his questions about World of Ends and Doc's answers. Very helpful on both ends, so to speak.

Betsy Devine has also weighed in with some support and some thoughts of her own.

SXSW Tuesday Morning: Conversations and Games

I session-hopped; too many interesting sessions this morning.

Cliff Figallo talks about "Putting conversation to work." He's one of the founders of The Well and lived on The Farm, a well-known hippy commune, for years; Stewart Brand, the creator of The Well, wanted people with communal experience running it, not businesspeople.

"Attention is energy," he says: the person being attended to gets energy from it, including people who are being jerks.

Conversations that work, he says, are different than ones where people connect for enjoyment. He's thinking of conversations as something that organizations do to get their jobs done. "Power imbalances destabilize conversations." In business conversations, there's often an imbalance. Thus a "subtext" develops in which you can read the disenfranchisement. To keep a business conversation going, the business has to evolve into something more egalitarian. But within the conversation, first you have to acknowledge the power imbalance. Second, you should have a "full value contract": everyone agrees that they're going to listen to one another, respect one another, and do what they can to encourage one another speak.

Warren Spector ("Deus Ex") and Richard Vogel ("Star Wars") are talking about games. Spector says that the next step in facial expressions is on the way, coming first maybe from Valve (Half Life 2).

Someone in the audience recommends there.com where you get control over your character's emotions, but apparently there's nothing actually to do. Spector says that he thinks Star Wars on line will be the first massively multiplayer game in which "game designers haven't completely abdicated their duty."

Spector has had so little success finding writers who can write that now he's hired programmers who can write. "Thief and Thief 2 are literature with regard to their writing," he says. (Well, I've played Thief and it's a good game but it isn't literature. Now, No One Lives Forever is different issue.)

Spector sums up the latest Game Development Conference: Sequels, online stuff, and the process issues involved in game development, and how to come up with games that put players in charge ("Grand Theft Auto").

Vogel: Agrees. GTA3's gameplay is "awesome."

I didn't go to Po Bronson's "How to live your life" session because I don't want to live my life. I want to live Po Bronson's life.

What a nice bunch of kids!

The Radisson I'm staying at in Austin has a single meeting room set up with ethernet Net access. So, last night after the excellent EFF party, which I left as soon as the band started up and all conversation ended, I went there to pick up my email. It was about midnight and a handful of 20ish guys were there, along with one similarly-aged woman. The guys turned out to be the band "Trouble Is" who were on their way to LA to play a gig at the Troubador (I think).

I've never heard of them, of course. But what a polite group of young people. They worried about my Net connection, apologized for "disturbing me," and offered to share their vittles. After about 45 minutes, I gave them the "MP3 is not a crime" bumpersticker I'd bought at the EFF party and told them they were giving rock 'n roll a bad name by being too polite.

And when they began talking about doing a road diary, I got to tell them about weblogs.

April Fools, Lynn Cheney

At the 20x2 event, Neal Pollack used his 2 minutes to kick off a campaign to get every weblogger to make fun of Lynn Cheney on April 1 in response to the White House's heavy-handed attempt to censor a parody of her at WhiteHouse.org.

Fine idea, although we've gotten to the point where blatant attempts at censorship by the White House now are way down on my list of Things to Worry About. Sigh.

A Dutch Perspective

At a party at SXSW last night — actually, it was a bizarre event called 20x2 in which twenty people (including me) each gave a 2 minute presentation on the theme "What are you waiting for?" — I talked with a visiting Dutch businessman. After introducing myself by apologizing for my country's behavior, he said that he was surprised by the loudness of the drumbeats. His example was CNN's official title for their coverage: "Showdown: Iraq." "It's as if they can't wait for it," he said. Good point. A showdown has to have an outcome in which someone wins and someone loses. America would never "backdown" from a showdown. But this is a showdown only because we have insisted that it be one. CNN calling it a "show down" ain't journalism.

What does CNN think it is, a blog?

SXSW Monday Afternoon: Josh Davis

Joshua Davis (praystation) gave a keynote that featured beautiful images, mainly drawn programatically in Flash, and sometimes involving multiple transforms between Flash and other graphic apps. Some astounding stuff.

But I found his presentation style grating: a lot of riffing in pursuit of outrageousness. On the other hand, the audience loved him. It's probably a generational thing. Bring on the fuddy-duddies!

SXSW Meta Blog

Cory has pulled together links to various bloggings of the sxsw conference. (At the moment, Josh Davis is revving up his keynote...)

SXSW Monday Morning: Books

Thoughtful panel on the future of book publishing.

A single idea from it: Karen Bickner shows a scan of a Whitman draft and compares it with a Microsoft Word document with rev tracking turned on. She says that the publisher doesn't necessarily have to be the one who preserves the electronic drafts with all the edits in it. She points out that the Whitman draft was preserved not by the publisher but by a collector. Perhaps, she suggests, publishers should work with collectors to save the drafts.

SXSW Monday Morning: Misc

I popped into four out of the five 10am sessions. I was most surprised by the one on CSS, by far the most heavily attended. The panelists were trying to convince us that style sheets are a good thing. They had excellent demos of how easily you could transform an ugly page into a pretty one just by using CSS to define and re-define the elements. 100% agreement. But why would this audience of Web designers need to be talked into the value of CSS? I hope that the panel was just aiming too low. (One of the panelists pointed to favelets, small utilities including some that will help CSS designers; it requires the use of Microsoft IE, preferably on a Mac.)

I ended up spending the last half of the time segment in the discussion of computers in the classroom. Interesting hard-to-summarize conversation with a lot of healthy skepticism about the effect of plopping computers into schools. E.g., a panelist points out that kids' non-educational experience of computers encourages speed: "Hurry and get to the next level." That, she points out, isn't exactly conducive to learning.

Philip Tarlow, the co-author of Digital Aboriginal, suggests that kids are learning to multitask in a PhotoShop sort of way, i.e., with "layers." Interesting simile.

World of Ends links

Doc has compiled a list of blogs and comments on World of Ends. I've fallen hopelessly behind because I'm at a conference, so I'm especially glad that Doc has been diligent. Oy caramba!

Bush is a liar

Stu Rubinow located the page I was looking for that details the gap between Bush's words and deeds. Why the press focuses on whether Kerry ever said he's Irish instead of on this is beyond me.

Star Trek: Numb-esis

Since I am apparently a couple of weeks too early to watch Austin's 4 million bats swarm at dusk, I went to my hotel room and paid $11 to watch Star Trek: Nemesis. I didn't sleep through it entirely, but not for want of trying; the random zizzing of phasers kept waking me up. What a bad movie! Predictable right from the first scene in which a bunch of Romulans get turned into stone and break into pieces. And then there's the second scene in which the surprisingly unconvincing Patrick Stewart seems to be addressing a group of cadets but turns out to be giving a wedding toast. Then there's the third scene in which I'm floating in a sac of warm fluid, happy until I hear a zizzing sound and wake up to realize I've just wasted $11.

The parts of the movie I actually saw seemed to combine the soporific exposition of the latest Star War movies with the plaster-of-paris thrills of a Flash Gordon epic. In fact, I wonder if this movie was meant as an homage to the Flashter; the chief baddy has a striking resemblance to Ming and the sets are pretty cheesy.

It's a bad movie when the best acting comes from the android.

SXSW Sunday Afternoon: Doug Lenat

(I lost my notes on this presentation due operator error. Um, I mean, Windows crashed. Yeah, that's the ticket.)

Doug Lenat's been running the CYC project for twenty years. CYC is a computer program intended to understand enough of common sense that it can answer questions and make deductions useful in the real world. To do this, Lenat's team — and now anyone with Internet access — feed it millions of rules about how the world and its humans work. Lenat says that the project has now crossed the line from "priming the pump" to being useful. He pointed to some deductions CYC had made about oil shipments based on information from several large databases. The surprisingly labored demo showed CYC making reasonable assumptions about the implictions of someone giving someone else a gift of a Segway. For example, it "knew" that the Segway, as a transportation vehicle, needs a light if it's going to be used at night.

Lenat said that CYC can think the way any particular culture does by specifying the rules relevant to that context. So, to use Lenat's example, it could think the way an 18th century Italian nobleman did, although it seems to me that that would require us knowing which millions of rules model such a person, a project that would seem to require putting in more knowledge than we have and more than could result from the effort.

My reaction to the presentation and the demo was that this just proves that humans don't think the way CYC does.

Berninger on Peace

Daniel Berninger's perspective on the context for the coming war on Iraq concludes:

Making the world safe for Democracy means eliminating poverty not threatening Iraq with the death and mayhem of 3000 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Peace will remain elusive as long as we accept the suffering of others as the price of American Democracy...

World of Parodies

Stavros the Wonder Chicken parodies World of Ends. A sample:

A tip of the coxcomb to The WonderChicken...

SXSW Sunday Afternoon: Education

The education panel was disappointing to me, but only because of my own idiosyncratic interests. The audience seemed fully engaged, asking very particular questions and getting very specific answers.

The panelists came from companies that build interactive content. Fine, but I seem not to care about that very much. I care more about the emerging student-to-student engagement: using IM to do homework together, email to work on projects, etc. There's such an opportunity to provide class-based collaborative tools and use these to fuel "knowledge portals" (i.e., "Let's look up what last year's sixth grade did for this project"). I'm sure there are companies doing this already. I would have liked to have heard from them.

But, then, that's just me. It's like going to Lessig's session and wishing he'd talked more about car leasing programs.

(One of the panelists, 4empowerment, does provide discussion boards and chat rooms.)

SXSW Sunday Afternoon: Lessig

Have I ever mentioned that I love Larry Lessig?

He begins with a sanctimonious quote from Jack Valenti. Morals, democracy, integrity. All being corrupted by sharing. Sharing has introduced a moral decay.

Lessigs says: In 1923, you could renew your copyright for another 28 years. Over 80% of copyright holders did not renew their copyrights. In 1998, works from 1923 were to pass into the public domain (because of the copyright extensions after 1923). 98% of the protected work were sitting unavailable because they were out of print in one way or another; copyright wasn't protecting those works so much as making them invisible. This is the pain point Lessig keeps returning to. (I think it's one level of concreteness short of being an argument that works on a broader audience. That audience will ask: "Why do I care about the 98% of crap that wasn't good enough to be kept in print?")

He reminds us that Steamboat Willy (the first incarnation of Mickey Mouse^TM;) appropriated Steamboat Bill, Jr., a Buster Keaton film. (The Keaton film is still a funny, by the way.) This was the beginning of what Lessig would like us to think of as "Walt Disney Creativity," which we should celebrate: the appropriate and re-expression of popular culture.

Lessig says that we struck a deal with creators that would allow works to pass into the public domain. This deal has been violated, a betrayal fronted by Jack Valenti. The 2% of works still available were protected at the expense of the 98%.

Copyright was created to protect authors but in an era of media concentration, it protects publishers. Further, it homogenizes the culture. "We have never in our history have had a time when fewer inerests have controlled more of the creative process." Does it make sense for creators, Larry asks. The Internet made this concentration important for we've gone from consumers to creators.

He shows an hysterical video of Bush and Blair singing to one another, created and distributed by Read My Lips — a couple of guys with a computer and a Net connection.

Why don't we have the freedom that Walt Disney had in 1928?

Larry says we've tried to get Congress to fix it. He tried to get the Supreme Court to recognize that his position is the conservative one. We failed, he says. ("No, you didn't, Larry," I want to cry out, giving him a big hug.)

He introduces the Creative Commons: "We need something for those who want to reserve some rights. "We need to stop solving for the extreme case and begin to build an architecture that can support this middle." Creative Commons provides a layer of "reasonable copyright control."

Tomorrow, Creative Commons will introduce new "versioning" llicenses, including a sampling license, an education license, and a developing nations license that allows poorer countries to build on what other, more affluent societies have built. (Very cool idea.)

We need a way to say "I believe in free." He says: "The world is not divided between those who believe in all control and those who believe in no control," and we need to make this clear to Washington.

We need to reclaim this space from the lawyers. "We [lawyers] don't belong in this space."

Moving peroration: "We believe in a democratic nation...We believe that only in a nation where people can express themselves freely will people come to understand the truth..." "The honor of our nation has been the honor of free people who can speak about freedom without calling their lawyer." This freedom is within our fingertips because of our new technology.

In response to a question, Larry says he's discouraged about legal remedies because Eldred was a clear, obvious and extreme case. If ever copyright was going to be limited, this was it. The battle has to be waged in a place where politicians respond to ideals because they think votes are at stake. But he's not optimistic about it. (Larry is, after all, the Internet's most important pessimist^TM;.)

Brewster Kahle is building the world's largest archive. He's giving copies of it — hundreds of hard disks — to other cultures to make sure it survives any global unpleasantness. The first is in Egypt.

Those 7 Justices who voted wrong in Eldred represent the common view of copyright. We have to make this clearer to the broad run of citizens.

SXSW Sunday Morning: Journalism Old and New

Josh Benton (Dallas Morning News and crabwalk) says he's the least optimistic panelist about the effect of blogs on journalism, but in part because he, says, old media isn't as monolithic as we think. For example, he gets more responses to what he writes in the print media than to his blog and not just because the print articles have more readers.

Dan Gillmor (San Jose Merc News and blog, of course) is thrilled by the way blogging gives voice to people outside the usual centers. "My readers know more than I do," he says.

JD Lasica (Online Journalism Review and blog) begins by snapping a photo of someone in the audience. "The line between audience and panelist is arbitrary," he says. (I'm sitting next to Ernie the Attorney who has been wondering if our aversion to control structures sometimes get in the way of developing online communities.) Not all blogs are journalism, JD says, but many do "commit random acts of journalism"

Matt Haughey (metafilter) says that old journalism will have to take on some of the properties of new journalism.

Is blogging just unreliable journalism? JD points to Ken Layne's saying "We can fact-check your ass." Dan looks forward to the day that our bullshit filters apply strongly to all media. Is there a NY Times of blogs? Dan replies that blogs aren't general purpose. He points to Glenn Fleishman's weblog on 802.11 as "the best source of information" about wifi. Matt says, "Blogging's transparent."

Josh worries that people only read what agrees with them. (Personally: Nah. Sure, we probably all tend to read what we agree with, but, first that's not close-mindedness but how we understand and learn. Second, even if you try to stay close-minded, you will bump up against more dissenting opinions than you did before the Internet.) Dan points to blogs that proudly point readers to sites that disagree with them.

Josh doesn't want weblogs to try to become journalism. "It bastardizes the form." A scattering of applause.

Dan: We're seeing a democratization of media itself. It's bringing new voices. JD says that within a few days of working in the media, you understand what the filters are: what will get your story on the front page, etc. Blogs explode the myth of objectivity.

Question: Old media journalists still get all the access. Dan: Glenn F. in fact has as much access as any print journalist and it's only because he's built such a valuable and respected site.

Dan: This is a grand opportunity for people in business and government to get the world out. But if they treat it as another chance to bullshit us, we'll detect it. Q: Do you see any businesses using it well? Dan: Not yet. (Note: the referent of the "it" is ambiguous: weblogs or the web.)

SXSW Sunday Morning: Styn

John Halcyon Styn of Cocky Bastard and LifeStudent is talking about how the Web set him free: he found he could be totally honest and people would love him for it. He asks the audience if others have found that, too. Does the Web, he asks, attract people who find the RW inhibiting?

An audience member (Ben) is describing how he revealed too much on his site and had to pull back. He wrote about his ex-girlfriend, their sex lives, her new boyfriend, etc. He took the material down and felt bad about "censoring" himself. "You can't tell other people's stories."

A guy in the audience writes LittleYellowDifferent.com which I'm browsing in the interstices of my attention. Looks interesting and funny. [NOTE from 2 days later: He just won the Bloggie for Best American Blog, so, yeah, I guess his blog's ok.] He tells how he came to blogging and how it has made him more open and confident.

John says that his life on line has improved his social skills in the RW. He knows that there are people in the world who identify with him: He can be who he is and people somewhere will accept him. Really good point.

Interesting, heartfelt, conversational session.

SXSW Saturday

I gave the opening presentation: "Why the Web Matters." It was close as I've ever come to doing a straightforward "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" presentation. It was largely new material, which always makes me nervous. After all, if I have any capacity to learn from experience (discuss amongst yourselves), then the debut of new material will always be the worst presentation of it.

I, of course, have no idea how it went.

Now I'm in the Social Networks session. It's up against stuff competition: Cory Doctorow on a panel about Doing Good Online, and the cyborg guy, Kevin Werbach. No, Kevin Mitnick. Damn, no Kevin Warwick. Anyway, I'm in this one about building social networks that work where my three friends — two of whom I met in the flesh for the first time today — are talking: Nancy White, Jon Lebkowsky and Adina Levin.

Nancy is telling about her experiences as a group facilitator in Armenia, Azerbaijan and elsewhere. She's saying that the online connections that had been made paved the way for stronger personal relationships once people met f2f. The connectivity also worked against the hierarchical power flow. "It's very disruptive," but in a good sense.

In terms of particular technologies, Nancy says they used WebCrossing and IM and tried to move people from email because the group doesn't benefit from one-to-one emails.

Adina is talking about SocialText, a new company she's working with. (Note: I'm on the Board of Advisors. I joined before it had a name or even a direction because the founding people, including Adina, are so strong.) Just as a blog is the simplest way to publish, she's saying, a wiki is the simplest way to collaborate. The company uses a wiki to work together. For example, they take notes on the wiki during their weekly status meeting and then edit the wiki to turn it into a project plan. Anyone can add to the wiki, but one person has responsibility for keeping it orderly and useful.

SocialText has a "just-in-time" philosophy, or perhaps it's an attitude. They are developing infrastructure only as they need it. Their software will be open source for community projects and they'll have proprietary software to sell to companies.

Jon is telling us about Joi Ito's "happening," a multi-modal meeting that included telephone, wiki, QuickTopic document review, and chatting. (Note: I invested in QuickTopic.) The wiki was more useful as a way of storing material for after the meeting. Adina says that if you're in a meeting in a physical room, you use visual cues to see how people are reacting. During the "happening," chat served to give those cues. For example, with 20 people on the phone call, if you wanted to speak you typed "hand" into the chat.

An audience member is complaining that QuickTopic sucks. (Quick, get me my broker!) QT is separate from the web site you're working on, has separate UI, etc. But his real question has to do with how you work in or transform the customary ways of working. Nancy says you have to be sensitive to this. She says that there has to be a time of discovering the differences.

Jon says that an email list grew out of the Happening. It went well and then suddenly stopped. Nancy poses the question: what is leadership in an online group. Nancy says the online world supports visionaries (and delusionals, adds Jon) who are good at communicating, but it's not clear how to keep the non-leaders involved. Ernie the Attorney suggests that it might be because hierarchies have some uses.

Interesting. Good to hear from people with experience...

Proportionality

Dan Gillmor points out that the media dustup about whether John Kerry has falsely given the impression that he's Irish is dwarfed by the staggering flow of lies from Goerge Bush.

I've lost the link to a recent page that, in table format, compares Bush's words to his actions. Anyone know which one I'm referring to? Seemed pretty factual and they certainly didn't spend a lot on making the page look beautiful.

(The fact that I'm sitting one computer over from Dan in the SXSW press room makes blogging this feel pretty weird.)

SXSW Friday: Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is giving a free talk (what else?) on the Friday before SXSW (south by southwest) opens. The guy doing the introduction has just larded on the justified praise, and then said: "And after having Richard live in my house for a week, I can say that he's a world class pain in the ass." Big laugh from everyone, including Stallman.

Stallman talks without notes with the deliberateness of someone sure that his content alone will hold an audience.

He says that free software has several dimensions of freedom and benefits:

0. Freedom to run the program
1. Freedom to help yourself by changing the program to suit your needs
2. Freedom to help your neighbor by distributing the sofware
3. Freedom to help your community so others can benefit from your contribution

(Ah, zero-based lists. As far as I can see, all this does is make people add one when they tell someone how many bullets were on the list.)

"The same copyright laws that were unobbjectionable 40 years ago if they existed today would have serious problems." He goes through several hundred years of technology and copyright law showing that laws that used to protect our interests now serve corporate interests. It goes for too long and it covers too much. We're used to buying books, checking out from the library, lending them to a friend and re-reading them. Publishers want to take all of these rights away from us.

A first step: Shorten copyright on books to ten years. For software, maybe copyright should be for three years, with all the source code on escrow so it could then be released into the public domain.

There's not reason copyright should be the same for all types of work. He sees three types of work:

1. Functional works that you used to do a job: manuals, reference works, recipes. All should be free. It's important to society that people should be able to improve it.

2. "Documentaries that represent the thoughts of certain parties": Memoirs, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell. To change these is to misrepresent someone's thoughts. We should permit verbatim non-commercial copying.

3. Artistic and aesthetic works. On the one hand, the work has integrity and shouldn't be modified. But then there's the folk process. And Shakespeare took plots from other plays. But Stallman doesn't know the answer to this one. "This is a hard problem."

WRT Internet music company: "We should simply legalize it now." We'd all be better off. The recording industry treats musicians like dirt. He feels bad when he buys a CD because he knows the musicians won't see any of the money. Musicians really only get publicity out of their recording contracts. Internet music sharing is a better way to get publicity. Stallman would like digital cash so there could be a tip box for bands.

Zippy quote: "Those arrogant [recording industry] companies that think they can imnpose restrictions on us deserve to be punished. They deserve to cease to exist."

Reaction to World of Ends

A whole bunch of mail came in about the World of Ends site Doc and I posted yesterday. In fact, I couldn't have picked a worse day to be traveling and off line. For example, we got slashdotted and I wasn't able to read it until it was just about over. (Oops, looks like we've just been slashdotted again.)

Here's some of what went on and some responses...

Paul Boutin asks a series of good questions:

1) Who is World of Ends intended for? "Anybody who's into being all dumb about the Net" is not the answer I'm looking for here. What people and companies did you have in mind while writing? Who would you most like to see reading it?

A bunch of people have asked this since in the article we call our intended readers blockheads and adopt a supercilious attitude toward them.

It's not something Doc and I talked about explicitly; we just iterated on drafts until it sounded done. Our aim was to say flat out what we think is being missed by the corporations and law-makers who are threatening the Internet. So why not do an "End-to-End Argument for Dummies"? Because we wanted the thing to be read.

So, to answer Paul's question: The intended readers are the boneheaded captains of industry and government, but we didn't think they'd ever read it if we didn't make it highly partisan and somewhat obnoxious. If someone were to send them a memo outlining the article's Key Take-Aways, I'd be more than satisfied. (Those Take-Aways, in my view, are: The Internet is an agreement and Doc's "Nobody owns it, Everyone can use, Anyone can improve it.")

I like Michael O'Connor Clarke's thoughts on this topic.

2) What sort of "reasons to buy music from you" would you want from the record companies? Is there a specific model you favor, or are you saying the solution has yet to appear?

No specific model, although I assume that selling just the music bits themselves isn't going to be enough.

3) Specifically who and what actions do you refer to in the passage about "government types ... tinkering with the Internet's core?"

The usual suspects. The "core" refers not to low levels of the stack but the services and values that most users take as the heart of the Internet.

4) You say telecoms should "bite the bullet." Which bullet, i.e. what exactly should they spend on or write off at this point?

I don't know. If you put me in charge of a telco, I'd hire someone competent for the job — how about David Isenberg? — and take a very healthy severence package. (Then I'd appoint Lawrence Lessig to the Supreme Court.) But I do believe that the telcos are standing in the way of what a free market would demand.

5) "The value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet." Help me out there. Most of the Internet's value doesn't come via wireless. Are you saying open spectrum would create such a huge value add to the Internet it would render the current value irrelevant? Or are you just saying the benefit would be worth the writeoff?

I put that poorly. I meant that an open spectrum policy would result in a marketplace for innovation much like the one that the Internet has created. More here and here.

6) You've basically said ads on Web pages aren't worth the effort. How should Google make the money to fund itself instead? Or should they just keep taking money from chumps whose messages they know are being ignored?

We didn't mean to say that ads are never worth the effort. Many aren't. I happen to like Google's approach.

7) Despite the earlier action on this list, I sense that very little of this seems aimed at Microsoft per se. Am I right?

It's aimed at any company that thinks it can and should coerce us into accepting one-sided agreements, so, yes, it is definitely aimed at Microsoft. That doesn't mean that everything Microsoft has ever done is Evil, of course.

Bob Frankston writes to me and Doc to suggest two additions:

The net is meaningless. It just transports bits and bits, in themselves, have no meaning. The meaning comes from interpretation at the edges and the interpretations are not unique and do preserve ambiguity. The tendency to introduce social policy at this level has perverse consequences.

The net only operates if it fails. There must be sufficient disorder to assure that the ends are resilient (the analogy with our immune system) and there must be sufficient perturbation to allow new ideas to be reaped. We don’t solve problem as much as discover solutions in the turmoil.

Good points. I think the first one is implicit in our article or maybe I only assumed that it's implicit. I like Bob's second point a lot.

Jonathan Peterson has cogent comments on his blog. He begins:

Marc Canter sent an email pushing back on World of Ends, reminding David and Doc that the user’s end-game (two-way full-motion video), should be kept in mind. Doc and David’s (stupid=flexible above all else) is the visionaries’ message to the decision-makers. Marc is right about keeping an eye on what users want.

In truth, I worry about altering the Net at the protocol level to accommodate any service, including two-way video.

Eric Norlin thinks we ought to take notice of the face that the agreement that is the Internet is dynamic. Can one perhaps see Eric's interest in a new digital ID agreement helping to make this observation more pressing to him? I'd draw a somewhat different conclusion: Of course the agreement is always changing. In fact, our article says that suggesting new agreements is a critical way the Net has grown. But, as the article says, new agreements need to be voluntarily accepted and in the interests of all. In my opinion, digital ID, "digital rights management" and "trustworthy computing" fail that test: the demand is coming top down, not bottom up.

Arnold Kling writes, in part:

Amendment: The Internet is not Microsoft. The Internet's destiny is not to be dominated by personal computers.

You see, in 5-10 years, we are going to look back at 2003 and say "We thought that was the Internet? How could we have been so stupid?"

Because in 5-10 years, most of what we do with the Internet will not involve Windows (or Apple or Linux). It will involve devices that we now don't think of as computers. The action today is in cell phones, but my guess is that over the next decade we will see other form factors emerge.

Michael O'Connor Clarke writes, in part:

The rallying cry you've chosen to end on is lovely — but without over-complicating things, I feel the urge to make a distinction in this piece between 'stupidity' and 'stupidness'. Stupidity is indeed something we should hope to lose, or hope big business, the recording industry, the telcos will lose.

Stupidness, on the other hand, is a value to be treasured, protected, nurtured...

Michael's follow-up blog is real interesting on Cluetrain and World of Ends.

Tim Moors writes:

I saw your web page and thought you might be interested in a paper that I wrote about this matter:

T. Moors: A critical review of End-to-end arguments in system design, Proc. International Conference on Communications (ICC), Apr. 28 - May 2 2002

I haven't had a chance to look at this yet.

Now it's off to the SWSW conference...

World of Ends again

I posted an entry about the new site Doc and I've written and two hours later it's after midnight so the entry's been pushed down into the Been There, Read That portion of my blog.

Unfair!

So, here's the crux of the posting (i.e., the crux redux): Doc and I have posted an article that tries to explain the nature of the Internet in terms that even a record industry executive could understand. It's called World of Ends and you're all invited to read it.

Bush's War

Whatever side you're on, don't you agree that if Bush were not president, we wouldn't be about to go to war with Iraq?

Perhaps this is due to Bush's great insight and courage. Perhaps it's for the other reasons. But, no matter what, this war belongs to the president the way no other American war has in the past 100 years.

Bulbs for Peace

Niek Hockx, who takes beautiful photos, including of the blogsphere's alpha Halley, blogs from the Netherlands about one detail Bush and Rumsfeld might want to consider.

Greenstein on Raging Cows

Howard Greenstein has a funny blog entry about the Raging Cow brouhahahahaha.

The World of Ends - the Net as an Agreement

Doc and I have cowritten an article - World of Ends - that point of which is:

We can stop being blockheads now.

No, not you and me. It's them other people who are the blockheads, the ones who keep making the same mistakes over and over about the Internet - what Doc calls "Repetitive Mistake Syndrome." It's the telcos, the recording industry, elements of the publishing industry, government ... you know, the blockheads.

Doc and I try to lay out clearly what the Internet actually is. [SPOILER] It's not wires, it's not programming, it's not a way to build robotic customer relationships. The Internet is an agreement. Plain and simple.

Take a look and tell us what you think. We have a discussion board especially for that purpose. We've been working on this for about two months, on and off. It feels good to be able to point people at it ... at least so far.

Bad timing: I'm on the road tomorrow and will be at the SXSW through Wednesday, so I'll only be online intermittently.

The Benefits of Being Republican

Now that I've registered at the GOP Team Leader site, the one that astroturfs newspapers and politicians, I've discovered two serious benefits — three, if you count the points I'm earning towards Valuable Free Gifts by spamming my elected representatives.

First, I'm encouraged to send letters to newspapers and politicians. All I have to do is press a button, and the pre-written, pre-thought message will be fired off. Of course, you can edit the text. In fact, I just wrote a message to Senator Bayh that began as follows (with my additions in caps, of course):

IF YOU GET EMAIL THAT SOUNDS LIKE THIS ONE, it's coming from the GOP "Team Leader" site and is spam. Speaking for myself: PLEASE KEEP ESTRADA OFF THE BENCH. Thank you.

This reckless filibuster of Miguel Estrada has held up this country's business for too long. This Thursday, you will have the opportunity to vote to end the filibuster and allow Miguel Estrada a fair, up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate.

Second, yesterday I received in the mail a lovely "signed" photograph of President Bush along with a request for a donation to the Republican Party. I'm getting to like being a Republican!

(Late note: Estrada has been defeated. Woohoo!)

More Raging Stupidity

The State Representative in Washington who walked out when a Muslim cleric gave the opening prayer on Monday has apologized. The cleric (Mohamad Joban) has been forgiving throughout. But how damn ugly can we get?

Wait, I have the answer! Read this dangerously cold-hearted pile of crap.

(Why the hell do we have prayers in legislatures anyway? God help us!)

Raging Stupidity

The Raging Cow blog is Kevin Marks' response to Dr. Peppers' polluting of the blogstream in support of their dumb ass milk-like drink. If enough of us link to Kevin's group blog, we can knock Dr. Pepper off the #1 perch for "raging cow" at Google.

More games

Jonathan Peterson amplifies my blog entry about flyguy:

if you like flyguy, you'll love the games at orsinal

Jonathan aptly calls these "haiku games."

Swamping Frist

David Isenberg points out that Senate Major Leader Bill "Secnod" Frist is running an online poll about Iraq. This mroning when I went to regsiter my vote, the site reprots that the server is too busy. Concrened citizens or danmed 'bots?

Ignorant Sluts

From the NY Times (and thanks to Chip for the link):

Bill Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole, are teaming up to revive the commentary segment "Point-Counterpoint" on "60 Minutes."

Mr. Clinton and Mr. Dole have contracted to provide 10 debate segments, beginning Sunday night. The commitment does not extend beyond the end of the television season in May, but if the format is successful CBS will try to continue it next season, CBS executives said.

Reminds me of the time about 10 years ago when my sister-in-law Sue was teaching freshman Rhetoric & Comp or some such course, I think at NYU. The class was reluctant to speak. Sue kept trying to engage them in conversation. Finally, a few sessions in, someone finally spoke up, disagreeing with something Sue said. Sue, completely delighted, replied, "Mary, you ignorant slut."

Shocked silence descended.

Fortunately, Sue was able to explain why she was impuging the sexual virtue of the first student who disagreed with her. These students were maybe 2 years old when Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd made that phrase famous.

The Pathos of Blogging

In a wide-ranging interview, Vint Cerf, the serendipitously-named Father of the Internet, explains the popularity of blogging:

I think this is merely an indicator that we would collectively and individually like our lives to "count" somehow and if someone finds our blogs of interest, it is confirmation that our lives and opinions are making a difference to someone.

I am not that pathetic!

Ok, yes I am.

Good Game Experiences

Mark Hurst's newsletter, Good Experience, has links to fun stuff in this issue, in addition to its normal load of useful ideas and pointers about desinging web sites real good:

A really fun and elegant game from my friends at gameLab here in New York. You can play the first three levels for free. I wish there were more games as well-designed as this.

A difficult version of the old Lunar Lander arcade game.

A well-done movie quiz, using visuals from the film, except without the characters' bodies. If you're a film buff, well worth a look.

And finally - the coolest thing I've seen online in months. It's creative, fun, friendly, thoughtful, and very funny in certain parts. Best of all, the design is understated and seems to use very little technology to accomplish its magic. Turn the sound on.

By the way. Good Experience is having its first real world conference on May 2. Quite the eclectic line-up.

SmartLetter

David Isenberg's new SMARTletter is terrific again. This one leads with the story of oil and applies it to the telephone system:

If John D. Rockefeller were alive today, he would be building fiber to the home...

And that David goes on to explain everything you need to know about how the future of telecommunications will unfold. Must reading.

David has unearthed a graphic that's astounding because of its source.

Flying Risks

Michael O'Connor Clarke points us to the new coding of airline passengers based on their perceived threat level and suggests his own 5-alarm system.

FireBlog Wanted

Firesign Theatre has a home page and a moribund 'zine. How about a weblog, boys?

Signed,

A Fan

Cory a-Burstin' with Memes

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a damn fine piece of inventive fiction. It's set in a society where there's abundance rather than scarcity, which pretty well describes the economy of ideas in the book. It not only manages at least a meme a chapter, but it's also got a twisty narrative with characters to care about. And it's fun.

You can download it for free (75,000 people did in the first month) or would it be very old-fashioned of me to suggest that you buy a copy so Cory can make some money off the damn thing? You can even get one inscribed by the author his own self.

The DigID Free Market Optimists

Elliot Noss has jumped into the blogfray Eric Norlin has stirred up (blast his eyes!). It's clearer to me than ever why I disagree.

Elliot in his blog puts forward the idea that a digID system will enable:

- user-controlled identity
- data-driven distribution
- massive competition

Those three together, says Elliot, will "virtually ensure the world ends up the way David wants it..."

I am not so much of a free market capitalist as to think that competition always gives the users what they want. Sometimes we get a Microsoft monopoly. Sometimes we get a corrupt, failing telephone system. Sometimes we get a medical system that turns away people without insurance. In this case, the playing field is slanted in two directions: against customers and against smaller merchants. Enabling users to surrender their ID information will favor the big players, the brand names because we'll be more willing to put up with their demands. I fear — but of course I don't know — that competition won't be enough. And with no real possibility of legislation, I'm stuck suggesting voluntary good-will pledges. How pathetic is that?

DigId Again...

Eric does a good job anticipating my replies to his replies about digitalID.

The people I trust who know about such things (including Eric) agree that the Liberty Spec will give users fine-grained control over their identity information. Many of the supporters of it like it precisely because it gives customers a shield against the commercial interests that are without conscience or soul. Having said that, however:

Adopting the Liberty Spec gives users a technical means to protect their ID but simultaneously and in exactly the same way creates the infrastructure by which ID information can be demanded and delivered. So, the defense is via technology but the demand is via economic forces. Guess which will win?

Fighting to Stay Anonymous

Eric has been blogging away about his useful Perry Barlow Paradox. I've been avoiding commenting because I've been too swamped with small, profitless alligators to give the topic the thought it deserves.

So I'm giving up on thinking and plunging in instead.

First, is John Perry Barlow's last name Perry Barlow or Barlow?

Second, Eric's Paradox seems to me to be generally right and a great way of putting something important: "The internet, in its current form, moves everything that touches it toward the public domain." This is true the way "Information wants to be free" is true: Often, but not always. And it's true the way the law of gravity is true: We can still jump and walk uphill.

Eric has used the Paradox to knock my notion that we have a default right to anonymity on the Internet. I replied with an elaboration of where I think the right comes from. Eric apparently is unconvinced.

I am likewise unconvinced that agreeing with the Perry Barlow Paradox, means giving up the struggle to preserve our anonymity on the Internet. The fact that things tend towards the public domain on the Internet doesn't mean that it's good for everything to be in the public domain. Nor does it mean that everything inevitably has to be in the public domain.

Doc has taken up the cudgels and I love everything he says in his blog entry except his conclusion. DigitalID is not going to empower consumers so that we actually become customers again. The Big Boys want it because they see that even if the customers are in nominal control of their own IDs, the economic power is so unevenly weighted that we will have to give up our ID info in order to engage with them. It seems to me that anonymity is a much more powerful weapon against the predations of corporatism.

DigitalID is forking the Internet into private and public spheres. We should be so unhappy about this that we fight against it, not declare it to be a law as inviolable as those of physics. Norlin's admirable Perry Barlow Paradox should be a clarion call, not Taps.

More You First

From Phillip Wolff comes these comments on my You First idea, a pledge by a site that it will respect our anonymity:

I'm drafting a version of this for job boards. It's a job board's business to share your information (resumes, CVs, profiles) with employers and employment agencies. This complicates things enormously.

Potential additions to your pledge:

- Transparency/FOIA. If it's about you, you can see it when you want. We will share with you all the information we hold that describes you or is associated with your identity. This includes data provided by others.

- Two-Degrees Exposed. We'll keep a list of those people/accounts/organizations that called up your information. You can see the list.

- Three-Degrees Transitive. Here are the policies agreed to by those third parties (employers, headhunters, et al) who call up your information as our customers. May be less stringent than our policies.

- Sunset. We will expire our copies of information about you according to rules we'll publish. Old data won't haunt you.

- Amnesia on demand. If you want us to purge our databases of information about you, we will, subject to legal obligations.

- Bind successors. If we sell off the business or a part of it, we'll shred your data or force the new owners to abide by all this. See opt-in.

- Civil Rights. While we will cooperate with law enforcement, we won't ebay your information. Our policies will defend your information like it was our own, requiring court orders or other lawful compulsion to turn over your data.

Excellent! Thanks, Phil.

Future Look

Mike O'Dell sends us to a site with images from the past of what our present (= their future) might look like. Very cool.

The Right to Anonymity

Eric Norlin notices my casual mention of "our right to maximum anonymity" and writes to ask where exactly this right comes from.

Unfair! If I had known someone was going to take what I wrote seriously, I wouldn't have written it. Nevertheless, here's a rearguard attempt to justify, explain or evade what I meant:

I'm not claiming that the right to anonymity is a legal right. As far as I know, no court has recognized such a right. But not all rights come from law. For example, most of us feel comfortable saying that Afghan women under the Taliban had a right to be educated even though they had no such legal right. The Right to Lifers assert a right for fetuses that the legal system hasn't recognized. And the parents of the American Revolution certainly were asserting rights not recognized by law.

But what is a right? It's the other side of a duty. If I have a right to not be X'ed, you have a duty not to X me. Rights generally are not absolute if only because they sometimes conflict. For example, your right to privacy (a legal right in the US) can be overridden if the police have reason to investigate you, or if John Ashcroft doesn't like the way you look.

Rights only emerge when we need others to perform duties. For example, we may have always had a right to clean air, but it only emerged as a right worth mentioning once our air got fouled. The emergence of a right can make explicit what had been an inconspicuous, default state.

That's how I see the right to anonymity. It's been the default on the Internet. A world in which that default is maintained is a better world than one in which our every click is tracked, our every purchase becomes a datum to be turned against us, our every download is assumed to be shoplifting. The putative right to anonymity is based (very loosely) on a facet of social life: we are an individualistic society that has to give me a reason before it can demand anything of me, including knowledge about me. Anonymity has been and should be the default.

Constitutional Amendment anyone?

Tom Stewart on the Net Revolultion

[Written on Friday...]

Tom Stewart — the intellectual capital guy and editor of HBR — is giving the keynote at the DigitalNow conference. He says that although the Internet bubble has burst, the Net has indeed changed everything. He backs it up with examples from the business mainstream. Cool.

Tom points to four transformations:

1. Speed. We can buy whenever we want. We can communicate whenever we want. A faster economy challenges executives who have to make faster decisions.

2. "There's no commerce like ecommerce." E.g., Wyeth is saving 25% by buying electronically.

3. King Customer. A substantial shift in power from sellers to buyers largely because of the Internet.

4. Loosely Coupled organization. (This is what I call The Hyperlinked Organization.) The line between inside and outside is no longer clear. E.g., 90% oF products with Cisco's name on it have never been touched by someone whose paycheck comes from Cisco.

The audience — heads of associations — absolutely needed to hear this message and responded to it enthusiastically.

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Making the World Safe for Slightly Different Opinions

A USA Today survey shows that 87% of Americans say that nothing any celebrity could say would change their mind about the Iraqi war. Good!

But that hardly means that celebrity protests make no difference. Even if they change no minds, they help legitimize the anti-war position. So, keep it up Sean, Martin, Tyne, Anjelica and every uni-named star who speaks her mind.

Letter from an Heroic Diplomat

John Brady Kiesling, a US diplomat with twenty years of service, has resigned because "the Bush administration has squandered U.S. legitimacy through a 'swaggering and contemptuous' approach to foreign policy." (Salon)

Pseudonymity

Norlin has a good explanation, based on Bryan's explanation, of how the Liberty Alliance spec handles account linking. There's a comforting indirectness about it.

Wifing the Hotels

Minutes after reading my blog entry about the lack of wifi in hotels, Jeff Chapman sent a pointer to an news story by Eric Griffiths at InternetNews.com about the deals Intel is doing with major hotel chains. Since Intel is wifi-ing its Centrino mobile chipset, it wants to hurry the spread of hotspots. So, we'll soon be seeing signs in hotels identifying hotspots as Centrino compatible.

Warchalking goes commercial.

Why I'd Rather Be Home

I came back from my ridiculously compressed road trip last night, woke up at 8 AM to find that our 12-year-old had just crawled into bed with us, and had an "argument" with him about whether if you have a mouth you must also have lips.

He did not accept my reasoning that a blow hole is a type of mouth.