Oblomovka

2002-12-05»

David Docherty, a man who, when he wasn’t bemoaning the immoral anarchy of the Net , was hiring “viral marketeers” to spam newsgroups with fake environmental groups to plug his new novel, finally departed his job at Telewest. His title was “Head of Broadband Content”, which is like being “Man In Charge Of What People Should Say On The Telephone”.

In his parting shot in the Guardian, he says that we’re a “cookie monster” generation, who want everything to be free. He says that the programmers behind P2P are “like Fagin in Oliver Twist – they just want to pick a pocket or two”. And that’s why broadband has failed, apparently.

I can’t think of a single word to say, except: how did he last so long? See ya, Chicken Dance Elmo. Hope you do better in a market intended to promote fictions.

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Summary: we don’t know, even if some people claim to. Energy-industry sponsored researcher Mark Mills told everyone it was around 13% of the total U.S. electricity output, in stories like the famous Forbes cry “Dig more coal — the PCs are coming“. The figure was bandied around as a reason for the California blackouts – even as it become obvious that the crazy power prices were down to a faulty deregulatory market and outright manipulation by Enron. Now WSJ columnist David Wessel points to a competing Berkeley report that says its closer to 3%. And admits that the chances are we don’t know. But what’s important is to admit we don’t know.

“When people hear a statistic that matches their assumptions about how the world is going, they tend not to question it,” Mr. Koomey says. That was especially so during the euphoria-induced gullibility of the late 1990s, when WorldCom Inc.’s UUNet subsidiary started an avalanche with the catchy, but false, claim that Internet traffic was doubling every 100 days.

Old assumptions demand re-examination. Are forecasts for electricity demand proving wrong? Some issues demand debate. How much potential does conservation really have? What’s the wisest way to be sure we have enough energy for the future? What should government do or not do to ensure that our children and grandchildren live better? What is best left to the market?

But no good comes from pretending we know more than we do or from treating suppositions as truths.

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So Quinn and I went over to the Internet Archive and interviewed Brewster Kahle about – well, whatever he wanted to talk about. I started with a list of the current Brewster projects I knew about – the Internet Archive, his donation of a copy of the Internet Archive to the Library of Alexandria, the Internet Bookmobile, his plan to light up most of San Francisco with free WiFi, his amicus curiae in the Eldred case, the September 11th archive, the Wayback Machine… he picked the bookmobile, and we talked binding technology, how books on demand now means its a buck-a-book at quantities of one or more, the future role of librarians, the collateral damage of the 1976 copyright law, how to get kids printing Dickens instead of selling drugs, and what happens if he got run over by a bus.

I’ll try and put up my notes after the Irish Times piece is finished, but if I don’t, here are the key blogworthy bits:

Firstly, the Internet Archive is in San Francisco’s Presidio which is a historic ex-military post that magically turned into a park in 1994. I don’t yet have an easy way of describing the feel of the place, but my notes say “Like a colonial version of ‘The Prisoner'” and “Americana-ville, Federalsburg”. It has its own law enforcement, fire and medical services. It’s very hard to estimate who lives there: my guess was all the ex-presidents, from Washington onwards. I expected to see Thomas Jefferson pass me on a golf cart.

The Internet Archive office looks like the village schoolhouse. I meant to ask Kahle how they snagged an office there, but we forgot. I forgot a lot of things; he’s somewhat of a firehose. Usually it’s pretty hard for an interviewee get a word in edgeways with me, but Brewster managed it.

Remember Rafe‘s blog entry about how 93% of pre-1946 copyrighted films are unavailable? I told Brewster and he said, well, they’re doing better than the world of books. 98% of currently copyrighted books are out of print and effectively unobtainable.

Of course, there’s not much he can do about the stuff imprisoned in copyright. But there’s still the public domain. The Archive has plans to scan 1,000,000 public domain books by 2005. If you’d like to contribute your own, pre-Disney works, just scan ’em in page by page as TIFFs and send them to the Archive. They’ll keep them for you, and for the whole of posterity.

He also wants to help libraries to start scanning in their PD collections too; make librarys’ access to their works a two-way street. He quotes Michael “Project Gutenberg” Hart:

We have the technology to take the history of the world to your town, and the history of your town to the world.

It’s a tragedy that children don’t have access to the whole of the public domain. This is what the Bookmobile jaunt was for – to show people the value of the public domain. (The Bookmobile would drive up to schools, set up their satellite dish, let a kid pick a book, and print and bind it for them, then and there. Cost a buck a book. They paid a dollar, and got to keep a book for the rest of their life.)

He talked about his grandfather’s book collection, how so many of those books are unavailable now. He wants to give the collection to his children. But he has two children. Where is he going to get another copy of these out-of-print books? His grandfathers been dead forty years: his library should have passed onto everyone.

“The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I’m not anti-government: I’m a librarian, not a libertarian. But that’s the truth.”

And lots, lots more. I keep hearing him say “we can make a different world, by building it”, which sounds clumsy copied from my notes, but in context, spoken by Brewster Kahle in an old wooden house with a bunch of commodity web servers in one corner, a whiteboard with plans to scan a million books on the wall to the left, and shelf with a freshly minted Alice in Wonderland and his federally-printed submission to the Supreme Court behind me, it made me think of Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Hayden‘s motto:

Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation

…and believe it.

I need to record these things on tape and upload them, don’t I?

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