So I didn’t get an iPhone 3G, because really I couldn’t bring myself to sign up to a bunch of AT&T years. But when I saw the refurbished iPod Touchs for $199 on the Apple site, I admit I caved. It’s sort of the sad halfway house for those of us who are strong in spirit, but weak in the flesh. It’s currently sitting next to my far more pure N810. I am rubbing them together in the hope that some of the nice implementation in the Apple product rubs off into the Nokia open source experiment.
I am sort of enjoying the flashy brattiness of the Touch, but I fear he is putting up a spirited fight against my Linux set-up, and thus rendering himself useless. Sure, people have Pwnage 2.0 now, so you can ssh into it, and have all the freedoms that Apple don’t want; but the latest firmware update also changed the hash value that the iPod software uses to check the “integrity” of the iTunes database. If you want to copy over music from a Linux machine on an iPod Touch/iPhone 2.0 firmware, you’re out of luck for now. Maybe not for long, as it didn’t take them very long to break the hash when Apple created this little roadblock. I will continue to lurk around on #gtkpod for the good news.
I’m racking my brains to understand a good argument (not any argument, a good argument) for why Apple would put a concealed checksum in the database in the first place. It doesn’t protect the music, or any copyrighted material that Apple might have a contractual agreement to protect (the music is still in the clear, AFAIK — it’s just the database that’s checked). It’s not part of the phone locking system, which again Apple can claim it needs to protect for a continuing business relationship. And it certainly doesn’t have a consumer-friendly reason, like making sure the database data is coherent — if the database is corrupt, iTunes doesn’t offer to reinstall your music, it demands you restore your entire iPod (actually losing your purchased music or apps whatever in the meantime).
The only reasoning that makes sense is that Apple dearly wants iPod and iPhones locked ever-more tightly into iTunes. Obviously, I’m shocked, shocked. But if I was Apple, I’d try and come up with another cover story quick before the regulators start sniffing…
I grew up in Essex. One of the many exciting things about Essex is that it is tremendously flat. My aunt and uncle lived in Derbyshire, and when we went there for holidays, I marvelled at the ravishing exoticness of real hills. Now I live in San Francisco, and I have my own hill, called Bernal Heights, which has wild flowers, one (1) microwave tower, coyote, lesbians and illegal soap-box derbies. I actually don’t live on Bernal Heights, being none of the preceding: I live in the neighbourhood of Precita Valley, which is about two foot away from Bernal Heights. (San Francisco neighbourhoods are about five feet by ten feet, and are mainly differentiated by differing property prices, native language, and whether their climate is tropical rainforest, saharan, or fogbound arctic tundra.)
Anyway, today Liz wondered what Precita meant in Spanish, and looked it up in a book. “Dude,” she said, “It means ‘damned‘. You live in the valley of the damned.” I refused to believe this, and looked it up on the Internet itself. People who live in Precita deny this, and claim we live in the Valley of the Dammed. The confusion between dammed and damned may have come from the location of San Francisco’s first sewer, which, as explained in this beautiful description of the city’s adventures in sewerage, was both.
We also discovered that Bernal Heights still has a few of the old prefab earthquake cottages that were built to house the homeless after the 1906 quake. We drove to a nearby shack (maps), and hummed and ahhed at its brutal simplicity and hardiness, and I took several photographs. When we got back we realised that we’d got the address wrong and we’d been admiring somebody’s very expensive apartment instead. It’s a fine line between shack and des. res. in SF.
Perhaps while attempting to decide my entire political framework was not the best moment to go and see The Dark Knight. That Joker chap certainly makes a persuasive argument.
Followers of the warrantless wiretapping program in the US should note that, yes, that was Senator Leahy who simultaneously stood against telecom immunity in the Senate, andstood up to the Joker in the fundraising scene. Wonder if he demanded another notable particular plot twist in the last moments of the film?
I have two minutes to post this in time for Saturday, so quickly: if you’re using Ubuntu Hardy, and you have libflash-support installed because you want sound and Flash (greedy), try this out. There’s a bug in Adobe’s closed source flash plugin which makes it crash frequently with libflash-support, but using nspluginwrapper will stop it taking out the entire browser when it dies.
I’ve found it kind of odd to watch in myself that for the past decade I’ve steadfastedly declined to announce my politics to anyone, even to close friends. It’s not because I’m indifferent about politics; it’s because I’ve felt that about the best label for what I believe has been tarnished by association.
So, here is what I whisper to myself at night, and get teased by my partners for slyly adopting at home and furiously evading the rest of the time. I guess I’m a… No, dammit, I am a libertarian.
I’m just not that sort of libertarian.
I’m a libertarian not because I think that white Western males like me are suffering under some terrible yoke of hardship: I’m a libertarian because I think that I’m extraordinarily privileged in terms of the freedoms that I do have; and that I believe that it is this privilege that provides the engine of my many other advantages. As someone who believes that, I naturally seek to spread that as much freedom to as wide a group as possible.
I sort of get the fist-waving anger at high taxes and your right to smoke down the pub, but it’s not really what I’m here for. I’m a low-hanging-fruit kind of guy, so I believe in crafting tools for people that will expand their freedom more widely, and building a culture and institutions that permit the maximum amount of freedom and the minimal amount of coercion. I’m an optimist, ultimately, about the power of self-determination to make the world a better place.
What I see online presents another view of the inhabitants of Libertaria. A lot of self-identified libertarians present themselves online as a victim of government and of other tyrants in the world (including, but not limited to, liberals, conservatives, the mainstream media, feminists, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the elite, and people who censor comments on their noticeboards). At the same time, others’ misfortunes are presented as their own personal responsibility, for which no-one else can and should give a flying Philadelphia fart. Charity should only be dispensed to the truly hopeless; changing the conditions of the hopeless is an impossible task we should leave to the fates, not each other, and certainly not the speaker.
I don’t think any of those positions automatically arise from a belief in freedom. I do think they lead you to be a bit of a dick.
When you actually meet a libertarian, much of the time, you’ll find the online stance gives an incredibly misleading impression. If anything, they seem more optimistic about how the world works, and more understanding of their own good fortune and the tribulations of others. They’re smart, and charitable and generous, and less doctrinaire than most political thinkers on every point. Also fun. Obviously, they then accidentally shoot you with their concealed firearm and then finish you off with second-hand smoke, but, hey, you should see what the Randians would do to you.
Of course, you also meet libertarians that are dicks, too, but not really in any higher proportion than any other group. (I’ve long ago abandoned my search for a set of ideological principles that magically turn you into a nice person: I think the final straw was meeting a total arse of a Quaker. How can you be a Quaker, for God’s sake, and still be horrible? Truly, God is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla.)
Anyway, I think I would have still come out as a libertarian, if it hadn’t been for the tremendous schism in the libertarian community over the response to 9/11 and the Iraqi war. If you knew a real libertarian, dear reader, you would be amazed by how many came out in support of Operation Flail Like A Dangerous Hyperpowered Idiot. If, by contrast, you gained your knowledge of libertarian thought post-2001, you’d assume that they were all about the “anti-idiotarian” flag-waving.
The split freaked me, and many of my friends, the hell out. Nothing to me seemed more counterintuitive, more contradictory, more challenging to my own beliefs than seeing libertarians who devote their life to campaigning for the minimization of the State’s involvement in their lives enthusiastically encouraging the world’s largest State military to rampage in the lives (and deaths) of thousands of individuals as a co-ordinated response to the murderous actions of a handful of extremists with no connection to those targetted. If this was performed by a non-State actor, would they have supported it? If so, would they accept the same action taken upon themselves?
And yet, somehow, this became the dominant idea in Net libertarian circles in both the US and the UK. In the end, I had to admit to myself that most of the libertarians I knew worked on a moral calculus that was unconnected to their love of freedom. Which is fine, but it’s not my moral calculus — or indeed my cultural bent. If I was going to identify as libertarian, I’d end up being painted as a special kind of traitorous, deluded, idiotarian, Dhimmist pseudo-libertarian, and frankly if I wanted that kind of ostracisation, I’d join traditional political in-fighting.
Now, it’s my suspicion that I’m not the only one in this position. I think that the whole Ron Paul movement was representative of the wish many to have a libertarianism they could trust not to claim that “using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense” is an honorable view. I’m not a Paulite, but he definitely appealed to a similar bloc of believers. What I think needs to happen is for this group of exiles to coalesce; after that I think that the moment is ripe for the flurry of ideas that marks the beginning of a new (or revitalised) political position.
I guess it’s because I’ve been waiting for that coalescence for so long that I’m finally admitting that I want to be a part of it.
(I hereby pre-emptively declare this “Post I will most regret having comments on”)
Here’s the Zapruder footage of my talk about the cloud and the edge. And, yes, I do appreciate the rich rich irony that I’m hosting this on a video-sharing site, and apologies if it makes you a bit travel sick. Be warned that it cuts out at about 24 minutes, just when I manage to get vaguely serious — the points I make after that are covered in just as rambling way in the original posts.
Not much blogging for the next 24 hours, as I’m about to disappear off to have a (non-scary) medical thing done, for which I will be pleasantly sedated. With a bit of luck, I’ll be deluded enough to blog while on fentanyl, and we can all have a laugh.
So somebody reading this blog joined the Open Rights Group and sent me their confirmation code, even though I have already received enough notifications to be forced to write daily for this month. Sheesh. People, this is the Internet: have you not heard of free-riding?
So, anyway, to burn up any remaining goodwill, for the forseeable future, if you now join ORG at the tenner-a-month rate (or up your payment by a fiver), send me your confirmation code, and then tell me which of the following you’d like from me. Choose from:
Another month of blogging (worth five ORG memberships) [no. of votes so far: 3]
A special one-off issue of NTK (worth ten ORG memberships) [no. of votes so far: 1]
A special podcast issue of NTK (ten ORG memberships)
What I really think of Andrew Orlowski (five ORG memberships, even though I know I should probably price this one higher)
I envisage you’ll be able to move around your vote when it’s clear I won’t reach any of these, but I’ll do that only at certain points, like in Mike Reid’s Runaround, so think carefully.
As a show of goodwill on my part, here’s Flowers for Debian, a piece I wrote a few years ago for Linux User and Developer.
One of the funnier conversations I watched at BlogHer was between some big league blogger talk to a small crowd. The big leaguer was talking about how she’d built up traffic by creating a community around her, and linked to everyone else, and written positive comments across the Net, and held carnivals, and proptly replied to email from visitors. She then explained that she was now really guilty about all the mail she didn’t answer, and how her community was always needed tending because some drama was blowing up, and how much time she had to spend reading and commenting on other people’s posts. The listeners looked in horror; eventually one hesitantly said “So I write online because I’m introverted. Why would I want to deal with anyone else?” Cue buzz of agreement from everyone else hiding under the desk, including me.
Speaking from adjacent experience, I’d say that one of the pains of doing something for fame and fortune (apart from the usual lack of fortune), is that the incredibly low quality of mass-produced fame. I may have mentioned tangentially before, but if you scale up who knows your work, you often end up with fans whom you can’t stand. For many, this is quite disheartening. How are you supposed to value your own work when it appears that most of the people who love it are idiots?
If anything, the effect of this online is worse than in Ye Olde Traditionale Media. We all know people who produce great work, but are afflicted with cesspits of comments that hang on their every word. The beauty of new media is that you’re in direct contact with your readers: the horror is that you’re in direct contact with people who you never want to meet, but who feel that they have some sort of relationship with you.
In the end, the conversation moved away from “building traffic” and we ended up talking about how slowly you can grow a blog: avoiding ending up with a mass-produced audience, and instead taking the time to organically grow a smaller, perhaps more costly, but ultimately more satisfying bunch of readers.
I got two surprise packages today. One turned was a pile of Jazz disks and semi-ancient copies of Analog from my past, which my old flatmate Gavin was relaying back through time to me. The other was a completely mysterious consignment of dalek cookies from New York. Given that in today’s mail I’d also managed to be mentioned in Those Slightly Mispelled Anonymous Internet Threats, I had a moment of mild paranoia. Surely if you were going to poison someone, you wouldn’t actually go to the extent of cooking them in the shape of daleks? But then, maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think. Maybe the design was supposed to lull me into a false sense of fannish security…
I spotted the Free Software Foundation trying to gently explain to people why the iPhone wasn’t something you’d want to buy. I know the standard response to this which is — oh, but man, it’s lovely! The counter-response is often something like ACTUALLY I THINK YOU’LL FIND THAT YOU CAN DO JUST THE SAME WITH A NEO FREERUNNER WITH GNOME ON IT AND THEN SOME SORT OF USB 3G DONGLE SELLOTAPED TO IT.
My official line on inter-platform rivalry, inherited from the NTK position paper on the topic, is that all software sucks and all hardware sucks. After years of using all kinds of shonky equipment: proprietary, non-proprietary, simple, or hallucinogenically complex, my main rule (like Mark Pilgrim’s) is simply to maximise the amount of unique and valuable data i can extract when the platform inevitably turns into the steaming pile of inoperable blast furnace slag that is the fate of all operating systems. It’s one of the more practical reasons why I’ve ended up edging toward open source: in the end proprietary set-ups grows so keen to trap you, that I end up being cornered in the corner using Vim and mutt, and if that’s all I’m doing, I might as well go to the happy place where noone wil actively attempt to step between me and my bits when it all goes to hell.
That said, I do agree that MacOS and the iPhone, on a “ooh that’s nice” level, really do kick the living shit out of open source platforms at the moment. It’s not all fancy pyrotechnics and the Steve-Jobs-As-Hypnotoad. And, frankly, I am totally willing to entertain that Jobs-built kit will continue to win on that front.
It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.
So, I finally put my old hand-crafted blogging software, deadhorse, to rest and moved over to WordPress. I’m sure I’ve put something out of place, but now you have comments in which to tell me how badly I’ve screwed up. Enjoy your new powers while you can, earthloids.
My switch over was really helped by careful cross-examination of the attendees at BlogHer, which I’ve been sculking around for the last couple of days. I spoke at their final day conference, answering (in a non-lawyer, hand-waving way) questions about blogger’s legal rights. One of the things I’m realising from these conversations is that a lot of people don’t realise that EFF has a finely-honed referral service for online folks (especially bloggers) who worry they might be in legal trouble, or are facing a DMCA takedown, or some other out of context legal problem . Eva, our referral co-ordinator, has an incredible amount of resources to hand, and while EFF itself doesn’t take on every case, we often know the right person to put you in contact with. E-mail info@eff.org if you need help.
Anyway, in turn, I shamelessly the other BlogHer’s attendees advice on how to set-up and run a blog. These are women here who scale across from casual bloggers to folks running sizeable businesses from their blogs, and have vast spanning networks of information and influence that I don’t usually come into contact with. I definitely think that’s a product of the conference continuing for a few years, and generating its own web connections. I remember someone I knew attending a few years back and saying that they recognised the excitement of a new generation of bloggers arriving, but felt a bit alienated by it. That’s understandable, I guess, but the organizers seem to have spent a lot of time moving on from that early excitement to ensure it didn’t fossilize into an “old girl’s club” of the same few figures. I get the impression that they really go out of their way to find new people (and of course they have a very wide brief to do so). When you work on deliberately maintaining that diversity for a few years — and yet you still have some binding quality to hold the whole thing together — the coverage and breadth of your attendees really helps drive the thing.
It made me think about the vague rules we had for Extreme Computing, which became OpenTech. Back then the idea was to “cross the streams” — force together geek clans that hadn’t really met, but we thought would be interested in each other’s work. The standard example I’d use was that roboticists would really like to hang out with amateur rocketry enthusiasts, even though there was (at that time) no real world venue for them to do so. Maker’s Faire does this very well, almost literally fulfilling the prophecy. The challenge is coming up with an umbrella that everyone likes the idea of standing under, without it just being restricted to people you already know. Dale and co’s genius of combining the craft and construction communities under the banner of “people who make” was brilliant in that direction. I think that rather broader, omnidirectional mini-conferences like Interesting08 work well, too.
I’m such a sucker for quixotically attempting to transplant things across the Atlantic that I shouldn’t even be considering this, but a British BlogHer or She’s Geeky would be so good. A few friends and I were idly kicking around a list of awesome women speakers; we came up with dozens who we see speak too rarely. It would be such a good excuse of an umbrella to get them to all speak in one place.
Prompted by Dave Birch‘s talk on digital money at OpenTech, I’ve been going on a long mental escapade through my own political roots, and the history of the Net.
I think that it’s inevitable that the dominant explanatory context and the direction of successful advances in technology and society heavily influence the politics one subscribes to. I grew up cheerleading microcomputers and later the Net, and lived through the vindication of their (material) success, so I’m naturally going to be a fan of decentralisation — actually, that’s a pretty empty statement. I don’t think anyone actually comes out as against decentralisation these days. Nobody says “Me, I’m a big fan of increased concentrations of power.” It’s like being against democracy — by the time you’ve explained why you have your doubts about it, no-one is listening to you any more. The main question on this topic in our time is not “is decentralisation good for the body politic?” but “how much of it should we have?”.
Which is not to say that the conventional answer would be “a lot”. People get rather shifty if you start on any project of power dilution, because such projects represent a loss of control to almost anyone who matters in the current system: even Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition want something to remain loyal to. You can disagree with the direction a ship is taking without wanting someone to come along and pull out the steering mechanism (or replacing the captain with a voting committee of the passengers).
Decentralisation deliberately pulls power away from the center. Either it works, and total control ebbs away. Or it doesn’t, and power gets re-concentrated in entirely random (or worse, actively dangerous) hands. Since almost anyone making a decision to decentralise has at least some access to the current levers of power, that makes it an unpleasantly radical decision to make.
Those who first built the Net and first to be drawn to it (the two groups are inextricably merged) were fans of decentralised power structures.(One of my favourite second-hand stories of the early years of the Net was from someone who wasn’t involved, but was around the research labs at the time. He claimed that the ARPANETters were always the flakes who everyone else avoided; obsessives out to pursue an idea that no-one else took seriously. If you wanted to have tenure in computer science, you stayed well away from packet-switching loons back then. He may have been bitter.)
If you’re a real fan of decentralisation — and your sole lever on power, as a packet-switching loon, is designing and distributing instruments that deliver decentralisation to everyone — the question “how much” becomes much more pertinent. Just how far can and should you take this? What happens when you turn all the dials to 100%?
Anarchy is the answer to that question. The truly hardened advocates would then say: “And would that be a bad thing?”
Those hardened advocates, in the middle history of the Net, were the cypherpunks. The strongest statement on their position was — is — the Cyphernomicon, and in particular Tim May’s Cypherpunk Manifesto: a prediction and prophecy of a radically-decentralised world, created inevitably by virtue of the widespread use of strong cryptography.
Would it be a bad thing? Just as it’s hard to cheer on extreme centralisation of power as a good thing, it’s hard to imagine complete elimination of central power as a good thing. I’m not saying that you can’t advocate for it: in fact, most people in liberal democracies in our times default to advocating for it, with the assumption that it’ll never get so far as to turn into something horrific (or transformatively beautiful). Call it a lack of idealism, call it a failure of creativity. It’s just hard to imagine it. Go on: imagine a world without governments. Despite what John Lennon (or Vladimir Lenin) claims, it’s not easy at all.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that difficulty, because I think it illuminates what we want from decentralised power, and what we think the practical limits are. It also challenges us to see beyond them.
One of the most vivid positive descriptions of a world under the Cypherpunk model of anarchy would be David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. But Friedman’s book is a series of arguments, not a vivid picture of daily life in such an environment. The closest he gets is a depiction of what he says is a close equivalent to the anarcho-capitalist vision, medieval Iceland.
Right now, I’m intensely enjoying S. Andrew Swann’s Hostile Takeover Trilogy, a space opera which includes as its backdrop an anarchist planet of Bakunin. It’s a great counterbalance to re-reading these broadly positive depictions of extreme decentralisation: Bakunin is a rough and vicious world, the sort of anarchy that most people would imagine would follow the collapse of an all-powerful State. On the other hand, it also paints a strong picture of sympathetic characters who rather like Bakunin’s backdrop. They remind me of the cypherpunks. Is that what extreme and irreversible decentralisation would lead to: a world order only a cypherpunk could love? Or a place where ultimately, any group could find comfort and freedom?
