Oblomovka

2008-10-05»

Even though I end up being the person at the party who is (almost literally) contractually obliged to defend a fairly radical set of positions with regards to the Net, I’m often far more fascinated in probing other people’s views on how the Net works, and how it should work — even when they appear to agree with me. Of course, there have been alternative points of view since the Net began: it’s not everyone who was comfortable with the individualist libertarian free-speech default settings that dominated the early Net. But beyond the surface policies, I think there might be a deeper divide in expectations about the future of the net, even among believers in a common set of values. Those who believe in the positive values of having an open Internet, with unencumbered free communication, with non-proprietary solutions to most problems, often have diverging ideas about how those positions should best be defended.

The first, and earliest stance, is technological determinism, which is the stance that assumes that the technology just naturally rolls along to maximize the right degree, and kinds of freedom. The internet is genetically immune to censorship; privacy is provided by encryption, and those who don’t use it deserve to lose theirs; corrupt empires are always stupid, and always fall. If you feel this way, then you probably don’t feel much of a need to overtly defend anything, apart from in Slashdot comments. If a particular situation occurs, you might even argue that its existence gives it a kind of moral credibility (Huge privacy violation? Inevitable consequence of sharing too much online). A lot of people still hold with this position. If you become disillusioned with it, you often end up with a far more sceptical position of the Nets benefits than average. I often read critiques of the Net that starts with a personal voyage of discovery that begins with this stance, and ends with wholesale cynicism of the corporatist, ad-ridden, society-undermining filth of the interwebs. It’s also the most common position to project onto your opponents if you’re criticising “techno-utopianism”.

A modified version of technological determinism states that while the Net and allied systems doesn’t always provide positive values, it can certainly protect its best values when assaulted by alternative models. I guess the earliest model for this is the pragmatically-arguedThe Cathedral and the Bazaar. In this, open systems are presented alongside more closed systems, and it’s posited that they while there’s no inherent technological inevitability about them, their benefits are such that they can hold their own in a free market against other technological futures. There’s still a touch of determinism: Windows’ market share was always going to be eaten away a little by little by Linux; but only by virtue of the fact that Linux’ openness provided key advantages against a more closed system. AOL and TCP/IP can do battle, and AOL could win, but TCP/IP would more likely to, because its’ values of openness provided for better solutions than AOL. Call it open exceptionalism: the open solution will triumph, not because it’s right, nor because it’s built into the nature of technology, but because it has an unassailable market advantage. I think that open exceptionalism is probably the default position of the Google/Linux generation. It implies a greater degree of activity in the world in order to achieve good results than technological determinism, but not by much. It’s sort of the difference between salvation through faith alone and salvation through faith and good works.

And then you have a Lessig-like pessimism about the inevitability of those positive values. Openness is good, but the Net doesn’t always show it, and the preservation of its best attributes requires constant vigilance against vested interests that would undermine it. There’s no exceptionalism here: the Internet was incredibly lucky to reach the place it did quickly enough before anyone realised it would be a threat. It existence is a good in itself, but it can always be bent to bad ends, and may already be collapsing without us realising. We must use all our political tools to protect it, or risk losing any benefits it might once have offered us: a defensive politicisation of the Internet’s basic values.

it’s surprising how these frames of mind can put similarly-thinking people on the opposite sides of policy decisions; think about net neutrality, ISP filtering, DRM, open standards for government in any of these contexts and you’ll see what I mean. I personally oscillate between defensive politicisation and open exceptionalism.

And of course like everyone else I spend a lot of time trying to clarify the often incredibly vague ideas of “open” and “free” that muddy any of these stances.

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2008-10-02»

There’s a lot of people who have written off the OLPC: a pet project of Negroponte that lost momentum the moment the old staff got jettisoned and replaced with a CEO who said “the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible” (in stark contrast to Negroponte’s original “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”. I think the worst criticism has come from those on the Get-One-Give-One projects, who have regularly expressed disappointed with Sugar, the OLPC’s user interface, and the general state of the software.

What I find fascinating — and this isn’t just true of open source projects, though I think it’s more transparently noticeable — is what happens after that bump of enthusiasm fades. I’m beginning to believe that the great advantage of more open software (whether it’s open standards or open source), is the growing importance of slow-cooked software.

Firefox is a great example. The original Mozilla project, in a commercial context, should have been shuttered long before Firefox was developed: it pretty much was shuttered, by AOL, its major sponsor. But still development trundled along, fixing bugs, developing new enthusiasms, attracting young turks, accreting knowledgeable coders. And it slowly got better. Far too slowly for anyone to notice, until the Phoenix/Firefox team turned it all inside out.

I’d say the same is true of Unix in general. People say that those who do not understand Unix are condemned to repeat it badly, but in everyone else’s defence, Unix’s smug position is largely due to Unix folk making all the mistakes, and then veeery slowly backing out of them over a period of decades. When other, proprietary, systems go over a cliff, you frequently never see them again: and certainly the market gives them no time to learn from their mistakes. Who knows the lessons that PenPoint learnt? A lot of OS X’s benefits come from being a slow-cooked product: years of gently baking the Cocoa class library under the faint heat of NeXT’s limited audience.

With everyone’s attention off the OLPC, it nonetheless abides. The platform has shipped something like 400,000 laptops already. They’re getting ready to release a new update of the software, based on the latest version of Fedora, and with a whole bunch of UI and activity updates. Most G1G1 users won’t know all this, sadly, because they’re not a school, and consequently miss out on a lot of the support that the OLPC is designed to benefit from (if you do have a XO sitting on a shelf, you might want to try the latest builds).

It’s still not quite there, in my opinion, but it’s getting somewhere. They’re learning lessons, and the lessons they’re learning are school lessons, taken from educator’s experience in developing countries. The hardware is still gorgeous, especially the screen, and they’re only just beginning to exploit its potential (the only bugbear being the mousepad which turned out to be a bit a of lemon: there’s a great deal of hacky code in place just to stop it from jumping around, and I believe they’ve abandoned its graphics tablet mode entirely).

It’s true — there was a great deal about the initial rollout of the OLPC that was screwed up, and if it was a strictly commercial concern, I wonder if it wouldn’t have gone to the wall by now. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t, and I’m fascinated to see what happens next.

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