Oblomovka

2006-11-23»

“The secret of success is sincerity. Fake that, and you’ve got it made.”
– Bob Monkhouse

I remember hearing Monkhouse say this as a child, and even then it stuck with me as painfully self-referential joke. At the time, Bob Monkhouse’s performing career was stuck in the wilderness: not because he wasn’t quick, or funny, or prolific, but because he came across as appalling insincere. The secret of Bob Monkhouse’s failure right then was he was trying hard to be sincere, and looking more and more false the more he attempted it. Not because he wasn’t underneath it all, truly sincere – but because in England insincerity is best described as the presence of any sincerity at all.

A friend of mine came to America from Britain before I did. He stayed for a year in Houston, Texas in the Nineties. During Thanksgiving at a local’s house, he had to bear each of the assembled take a turn very sincerely expressing, in monologue form, what they had to give thanks for this year. They spoke of their health, their family, their neighbours, their friends. When it finally came to him to make his homily – and this, mind you, is one of the nicest politest people I know – he could only say “I’d like to give thanks that I’m finally getting out of Texas next month.”

Sincerity is physically painful to the British. Delivering a sincere statement in front of them is like spraying a mouthful of holy water in the face of a vampire. Americans, by contrast, use sincerity as a subtle rhetorical weapon. It was my wife who first demonstrated this to me, delivering an explanation of its place in American society with such doe-eyed earnestness that by the end I was screaming for mercy. She pointed out the little sincerity competitions Californians play; the subtle social markers open goodwill plays in the mid-west. How in Washington politics, there were five hundred flavours of faked sincerity, which, like eskimo words for snow, my English mind could only perceive as one gormless act of yokelism.

I’ve been here nearly seven years. I’m at Ascension Island in terms of my nationality. I’ve learnt some sincerity: used it to patch up the social graces that the English universal social solvent, making dumb jokes, don’t fill here.

While I’ve been gone, Britain has been turning slowly and ineradicably alien; it’s wandered plate-techtonically from where it was when I lived there. The vein of new-agism that was just beginning to pulse when I left has got more of a hold. The buses seem cleaner. Europe isn’t as scary. Sneering at underclasses is more socially acceptable. And people are noticeably more capable and willing to be sincere at me, even when not drunk.

But I’m not there yet, and I’m not here yet. It’s hard for me to sincerely say thanks, even though on this best of American holidays, I want to express some sort of gratitude for my genius wife, and my mischevious daughter, and my extended family, and my friends, and my co-workers: Suw and the hard-working people at ORG, and San Francisco, and the mailing lists, and my cat and my computer and music and all the absent friends.

So let me slip it in as a hypothetical at the end of this entry, and just take it as read that I did, okay?

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2006-11-15»

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been the last few months. Others, idly mulling on why you haven’t seen me much on the Internets for the last year or so. And a few of you might be repeatedly IMing me saying “Where are you? What’s happened to NTK? Did you sell the gossip-packaged-in-horrific-web-design-and-courier meme to Nick Denton or something?”

One and all, thank you for your interest.

A core group of you – we’ll call them Team O’Brien, and give them a special hypothetical bandanna to wear – have known that I’ve been, as the English say, poorly recently. It’s true I’ve been sick, and they have been lovely throughout the last few months, and I have gratefully appreciated sucking their charitable instincts dry.

Everyone else – WHERE WERE YOU? Did you not see the signs? I thought we were friendsters! You were in my third-degree linked-in list, dammit! You clicked the “I care about him/her” checkbutton! Yet you never wrote, you never called.

Oh wait, you did, and I kept not answering or going “Mmmm kind of busy, let’s talk soon.” Almost as though I had a script that wrote that to you. Or was having an in-service-of-denial attack.

Nevertheless. I’m back now to tell you a thing or two. One is that while it’s not all better yet, doctors are now smacking their fists in frustration at not being able to prod me any further: a good sign. I am feeling much better, and I hope to become a threat to myself and others again shortly.

I am also having some fun raising my head above the parapet and discovering how much everything has changed in the last year or so. Apparently the dream of “hacking life” itself has become an industry (rather than the hubristic act against nature I originally believed it to be). Indeed, it transpires that almost any batshit idea anyone devised between 2000-2003 is now an industry. People who when last I saw them were living in cupboards and eating the stuff found in their keyboards are now millionaires. Okay, maybe just Linden Dollar millionaires, but still. Geeks who feared to go out lest anyone talk to them have now turned their social software upon themselves, and are now obliged to go to three or four “camps” a week merely to test the scalibility of the calendaring features. Truly, everything is new again, again. Again.

Well, almost. Some things have not changed. Debian is nearly finished, Firefox is still being rewritten. Perl people are nutty, Python people sensible, Ruby are still sensible within their domain, nutty outside it.

And I’m still burying the lede. The point is that last night I marked as unread 7000 incoming emails in my inbox, and sent them into oblivion. Your mail was absolutely right, and I’ve taken everything you said on board. I can’t make it to your thing. But I do love you. Write back, but not soon. I’m okay. I missed you.

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2006-07-04»

A new few-liner Ruby program, tagling, which uses Yahoo’s Web services to automatically suggest tags for a given piece of text. (I’ve finally grokked the Ruby nature, mainly by playing around with rake).

A new button to show your support for ORG:

More iconography on the ORG site.

I’m coming over to the UK in July, so if you’d like to meet up, give me a mail. I’m also speaking at LUGRadio Live on the 22nd, apparently on “focused discussion”, but really I’ll be talking a bit about Europe, America and digital activism. And swearing. They made me promise to swear.

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2006-04-03»

I have to admit, this is a dream event for me – in the sense that it has all the hallmarks of an event that ends with me looking out into the audience, realising I’m still in my pajamas, and then waking up in a cold sweat.

While I can’t exactly promise that for April 20th, if you’re in the San Francisco area, it should be a fascinating debate. There’s all kinds of subtleties to the pay-for-mail debate, including the nature of agorics, challenges to the end-to-end Net, transaction costs and the always-in-the-future future of micropayments. I’ll do my best to channel all the subtleties of the case for “free” email in as entertaining way as possible: and I’m sure Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson will have no problem broadening my mind and yours.

“Email — Should the Sender Pay?”: EFF Fundraiser, Debate Between Esther Dyson and Danny O’Brien

In light of AOL’s adopting a “certified” email system, EFF is hosting a debate on the future of email. With distinguished entrepreneur Mitch Kapor moderating, EFF Activist Coordinator Danny O’Brien and renowned tech expert Esther Dyson will discuss the potential consequences if people have to pay to send email. Would the Internet deteriorate as a platform for free speech? Would spam or phishing decline?

WHEN:
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

WHAT:

“Email – Should the Sender Pay?”

WHO:

Danny O’Brien

Danny O’Brien is the Activist Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help our membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public. Danny has documented and fought for digital rights in the UK for over a decade, where he also assisted in building tools of open democracy like Fax Your MP. He co-edits the award-winning NTK newsletter, has written and presented science and travel shows for the BBC, and has performed a solo show about the Net in the London’s West End.

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks, where she is responsible for its monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum, the high-tech market’s leading annual executive conference. As editor at large, she also contributes insight and content to CNET Networks’ other properties. She sold her business, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in early 2004. Previously, she had co-owned EDventure and written/edited Release 1.0 since 1983. Recently, Esther authored a New York Times editorial called “You’ve Got Goodmail,” defending a sender-pays model for the future of email.

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell Kapor is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. In 1990, Kapor co-founded EFF.

WHERE:
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street, San Francisco
(between Valencia and Guerrero)
Tel: (415) 863-1087

See the link below for a map: http://www.roxie.com/directions.cfm

Please RSVP to events@eff.org

To learn more about the DearAOL campaign against AOL’s planned system: DearAOL

Esther Dyson’s editorial, “You’ve Got Goodmail“.

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2006-02-07»

Hello, computer. This week I am spilling secrets (well, not really secrets, just not entirely known things) by public speaking in semi-private places. Untangle that if you can.

On Thursday, I’m giving a brownbag talk at Google, so if you know how to break into that organization’s campus, I’ll be answering questions there on EFFish topics. Want me to talk about EFFish topics at your company?Mail me.

On Saturday, I’ll be in San Francisco being one of Charles Enders’ caged and greased bikini-clad literateurs with machine guns at Writers With Drinks, where I will spend ten minutes reading a piece called Confessions of a Self-Help Guru. And after that, I will be at NerdSalon getting very, very drunk.

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2006-01-28»

IT Conversations has put my OSCON To Evil! keynote from last year up, which is really nice of them. Just so you get all the jokes, here are the To Evil! slides that went along with it. I guess I’ll just have to pray the Lazyweb will write something to synchronise the two. The presentation uses huge uncompressed images, and ingenious S5 presentation javascript magic. About five minutes before the talk I tried to make the standard S5 CSS a little more evil; I’m absolutely sure I succeeded.

In other news, you have no idea how proud I am that the Web2.0 Bullshit Generator uses “life-hacks” as one of the keywords. I’ll be a footnote to history yet!

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2006-01-23»

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to Get Out More. I’ve been tied up with a new job with EFF and a new home in an exciting city, both of mean I really ought to get out more, and speak more online. Somehow, I’ve managed to do the opposite, and have largely disappeared off everybody’s maps.

So, I’m determined to be a bit more visible. Yesterday, I gave an interview for EFF on Wikinews; tomorrow evening I’m hosting the regular monthly CopyNight at 21st Amendment in my new city of San Francisco. And at the Godforsaken time of 7.00AM PST, I’ll be sitting on my own on IRC in irc.freenode.net, #techactivism amusing myself while watching the Broadcast/Audio Flag hearings being webcast. Drop in if you want to see a bleary-eyed man trying to make sense of Washington politics.

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2005-09-21»

I don’t see the Guardian in this country, so I missed David Mery’s front page story about being arrested for wearing a rain jacket:

LONDON (Reuters): – A London underground train station was evacuated and part of a main east-west line closed in a security alert on Thursday, three weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 people on the transport network, police said. A Transport Police spokeswoman said Southwark station was closed and Jubilee Line services suspended between Waterloo and Canary Wharf in the east London business district.

This Reuters story was written while the police were detaining me in Southwark tube station and the bomb squad was checking my rucksack. When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting nice laptop. The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Then they arrested me.

David’s put up a record of the whole experience, which he is keeping up to date as he attempts to regain his possessions and investigate what happened.

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2005-09-19»

comrade worker: … okay, we can do that on the website. Is there anything else I should be worried about?
me: [adopting my completely terrible authority voice] Yes.
cw: Yes?!
me: Uh… yes. Yes there is.

[PAUSE] cw: And that would be?
me: [THINKING FURIOUSLY] Avian flu?
all: Avian WHAT?
me: Potentially pandemic virus? Mortality rate of 55% in humans?
all: [VISIBLY PANICKED] What? Seriously?
me: [TRYING TO REGAIN CONTROL] Yes, yes, but it’s okay, it hasn’t mutated into a human-transmissable airborne disease yet. You can still only get it from … from … [LOOKING AT FRANTICALLY GOOGLING, UTTERLY SHATTERED MEETING] … chickens…

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2005-09-17»

It’s been a weird year for me. I say that with the shock of someone who was intending to write “a weird few months”, and then started counting, and then ran out of fingers.

Since October last year I’ve been involved in projects that for one way or another, have discouraged idle gabbling. I’m not sure that’s been good for me. It’s given me a chance to think a great deal and get far ahead on some topics, but now I feel pretty lonely and a little insecure. I don’t feel I’ve done what I should really have done all along, which is bring others along with me for the ride. I know all this extra stuff, and it was delicious learning it all. But now it feels like just a big pile of boiled potatoes in my stomach.

I’m out of practice at being open. Or not completely open, but that half-way state that most people who have online public exposure built into their daily lives, that state of having the doors to their life slightly ajar.

I have an office now. I love having an office; after six months, I still get a little burst of delight when I walk in there. I love being able to close the door when I’m calling people, so I can concentrate on just what they are saying. Often I forget to open the door after the call. A few minutes later, I snap to attention and pull the door ajar again, because I can’t hear the buzz of what’s going on outside, and somehow that drives me a little crazy. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything; I feel like I’m missing.

I feel like when you’re sitting in the forest clearing, and it’s been very peaceful and quiet, but your good sense tells you it’s time to turn around and go back, because it’s a long way home, and it’s getting dark, and you have some friends who are wondering where you are.

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