6-05-02

cory uses the analogy of mail vs x400 for how kids just going out and doing open things trumps wise men deciding in committees all the time. this has been affectionately written about as cory's greasy kidstuff.
i have a better example for him:
ted nelson, still not buying in.
vs. the web. as with all the old wise white guys, he makes some good points, i think he may be right about the semantic web... and as far as he seems to be confused about what xml is, he would be right. fortunately, xml isn't meant to be used as a new set of hierarchical embedded formats. but it's hard to read his purist view because it doesn't screen wrap. still, joey de villa is right- we must respect our sages, our founders. out here we have so little history and we have to treasure it.... my screen *does* wrap because of ted nelson.

xanadu is ©, of late 80s owned by autocad. so while we live in a world of its reflected shadows we aren't allowed to fuck with it directly. presumably the type of people that made the web would ruin its perfection. the web works precisely because it is broken, one way and rots when no one pays attention. it is a great beast rolling through humanity, consuming our perspective, and growing misshapen limbs from it. this, the decaying stench of data and the perversion of all in the name of content, this more than anything keeps us engaged.

i have to confess though, i never got the whole 2 way linking thing. perhaps i am not quite smart enough.

6-04-02

says robin:

Even the words "truth is stranger than fiction" have become a cliche, and so lost their force. Just as the brain constantly adjusts the messages of the eye, quickly excising any optical pattern that remains static for too long, so the public soon turns a deaf ear to news that repeats with too stubborn constancy. Here's the power of this short circuit between inconceivable and assumed: we in the States can even get used to the idea that our most illegitimate, and most recklessly self-empowering, administration is a wholly owned subsidiary of Enron, the company that just lately sacrificed the public to its own unearned profits about as blatantly as anyone could ask for, singlehandedly creating last year's notorious power crisis without benefit of any actual shortage at all.

But that's not what I came to talk about.

Here's a remarkably audacious bit of satire--a false press release by a purported WTO spokesman (actually a member of the Yes Men, whose fake WTO site has been plausible enough to garner them several public speaking opportunities before) was not only believed by its audience, but remained in circulation for days, finally emerging on the floor of the Canadian Parliament before it was debunked. One little key point to note: the original Sydney audience was actually enthused to hear of the WTO's plans for dramatic restructuring.

Maybe satire can be a sort of coal-mine canary for us. When satire becomes invisible--when the parodists themselves are frustrated because their sendups of real-life activities are too easily and wholly believed--we need to realize how unlikely our reality has become.

The good news is that the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a man whose lawyer fell asleep during the trial that led to his death sentence has not exactly received due process as we like to understand it. Specifics of the case aside, a trial is a trial, except when it really isn't.

The bad news, I suppose, is that such a thing would be news.

6-03-02

says quinn:

what part of non-scarce do you not understand?

ok, i finally read eric raymond's piece that charlie stross responded to, that i posted here. i have now locked in my mind and image of some pre-incarnation raymond declaring that this money thing would never work, everyone knows you need to go to the central square to trade your sheep. otherwise how will anyone look at their teeth?

the thing that kills me the most is that raymond lives in a world of non-market signaling. i would most like to refer him to his own work, the importance of having users. this is probably a bit of a pat answer, but in hayek's time, there was no technology that could foster an environment of direct massive signaling. in raymond's time, there just barely is, and he has written about responding to it. by bank's time, i imagine it's pretty mature from what we have now. what's funny is that i'm not anti-market because it's not altruistic enough (another reason i make a bad socialist) i'm anti-market cause it's a inefficient and insecure form of signaling. it's slow, hard to interpret, doesn't scale, encourages tampering and rewards protectionist behaviors for individuals. i just think we can do better.

more evidence that we live in the future, at least the bovine clone farm future. i believe that given half a chance our government will ban human cloning/stem cell research, and then when their organs start to fail fly to europe or asia and have them replaced.

you know the chinese and reading up on this shit, and they're not going to ban any tech. they're ruthless, in a good way. i believe that the us government's attempts to lead the rest of the world back into the dark ages may usher in a new golden age for china. this is one of those globalization things that very few people seem to get: we live in a time of peer review, public publishing and massive interconnections. *there is no such thing as a forbidden technology*. someone is going to work on it, somewhere, whatever it is, period. this stepping hesitantly into the next industrial revolution thing isn't going to happen.

6-01-02

says robin:

Today Miriam and I spent a precious Saturday afternoon at a seminar on green roofs. I'd sort of vaguely heard about them before; today, despite a sadly unrehearsed presentation, I learned how they address a genuinely striking gamut of social, ecological and even economic issues (from the elevated temperatures of cities to smog, sewage overflows, asthma, and the untimely decay of the buildings themselves). Their relatives, cool roofs, address a significant range of problems without even costing more than their old-fashioned counterparts, even reckoned in the most conscientiously conservative terms.

In the end, though the demon is still the cost--and it's an oddly sightless demon. A Republican candidate for city council on the Upper East Side (kudos to him for even being in such a foreign place, really) asked after much vigorous discussion how he could make any of these designs appealing to the property owners who must ultimately foot the bill for the changes. He was told that the roofs pay for themselves gradually, after maybe twenty years earning back their initial cost in saved power alone. He was told that the initial costs, in some cases, were hardly higher than normal roofing, if at all (not true in all cases, by any means, but some). He was reminded of the various benefits that the green roofs provide in a wide-ranging way, and given estimated price tags for these benefits. But it seemed clear that in some tacit way, these were not the answers he needed to be sold on the idea; he needed to hear something like "you'll make a profit in two years," I suppose. Not just him; that's exactly what keeps these and countless other existing efficiency initiatives from taking off.

Buildings, in Manhattan or anywhere, ought to be designed to last a lot longer than twenty years. If the fancy roof pays for itself in twenty years in power savings, then the continuing savings thereafter are profit. But a lot of investors, knowing they must choose some investment (one kind of roof or the other, eventually), decline the one that demonstrably works out to a much higher return--saying only that the inevitable profit doesn't arrive soon enough to warrant choosing it.

On the flip side, they gave us cake, and it was nice to attend a lecture where the call for questions prompted a deluge instead of an uneasy silence.

5-31-02

says quinn:

i've been looking for a good way to distill down some of my thoughts about the wacky economics of this money and market stuff we are into. now, thanks to charlie stross, i don't have to. he's even framed it in terms of iain m banks, which is fabulous for me. this is what the net is really good for- massively paralleled merehums. now all that mental energy can be freed up for other things i will continue to put off writing. heh.

{it is probably good for me to note that i'm not a socialist and not likely to become one, but in viewing charlie stross' piece i can say way much much easier: i don't believe that socialism lends itself to strong signaling. socialism seems to depend on a state of mass cooperation, which i believe to be a neurological impossible idea. i guess i fall back to being an emergent structures anarchist.}

5-30-02

says robin:

(Hi there.)

Geeks know a lot more than I do about Internet politics, the bitterly contentious frontier of the rule of law. Like most people, they pay the most attention to the politics that hit them where they live. They're apt to be a little less aware of anyone else's hot-button issues, even when other people's fights are increasingly staged on their home turf--they're content as long as the Net itself is only a tool of politics, and not itself at stake.

George Monbiot, always shrewd in his accustomed political arena, demonstrates in a recent article and its even more recent followup the extent to which the spin agents of the wider world have seized upon the Net as a new weapon with which to influence public perception--or, in this case, to influence public perception of public perception.

But it's interesting to note that along the way, Monbiot has shown us that to get the scoop in this age, it well behooves a politico to be a little geeky himself. As these next years pass more of Monbiot's colleagues will start to sniff out the paperless trail, even some who now know the Internet as yesterday's stock market bubble. Inevitably there will be an arms race of masking and tracing.

When the net is host to deadly serious spin wars with stakes rooted in meatspace, will the geeks who build the battleground and know it best take more notice of those struggles? Or will they sigh and grumble, hoping against all odds (again) that the newcomers will go away and give them their golden age back?

says quinn:

i don't normally point to anything boingboing cause what's the point? everyone that might read this has already read that- but i wanted to link to cory's bpdg piece, because specifically i hate reading things like this. but cory actually makes this stuff readable. that's one of his greatest strengths as a writer, he is eminently readable. i also wanted to contrast it with what a broadcast war means in china. (of course, the last time i got excited about something in this newspaper, it turned out to be a complete work of fiction, something that has never happened to me with a blog, curiously.) i firmly believe this access to information is important stuff. i think of majorie (in africa) a lot when i talk about copyright, and i think of her little baby. that probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but i really believe the free flow of information is what will make the difference in the long run.

Dejagoogle:(n) A strong feeling that you've picked through these search results before.