Oblomovka

2009-10-22»

I’ve been laid low by illness. It’s not amenable to naming: I have a fever, but no coughs or sneezes. Headaches, otheraches. I’ve mostly been sleeping, and when I’m not asleep, I’ve been restless and yet exhausted, stuck in my apartment. A lot of my friends caught something similar, and it’s mostly taken them a week to shake it off. I didn’t even have the energy to make it to tonight’s EFF Pioneer Awards ceremony (boo! I wanted to see Limor “Adafruit” Fried and Carl Malamud win!).

What have I been doing, when not being ill? Well, possibly the maximally interesting thing for you, dear vicarious reader, was attending Ephemerisle, a sort-of-Burning-Man-like event for people who, instead of frying in deserts, prefer to drown in rivers.

There’s plenty of pictures and coverage of Ephemerisle now, I think perhaps because the event pulled 10% of the “novel strange east coast geek culture” press pool (me, Declan McCullough, Brian Doherty), and 60% of the “sympathetic portrayals of weird libertarianism” press pool (Declan McCullough, Brian Doherty, me).

My favourite review was from “postmodern conservative” Will Wilson, who said “most of the participants could best be described as left-libertarian… Curiously, most of the people I interviewed were under the impression that everybody else was a right-libertarian.” He also complained that it was “creepily non-political”, which must indeed look very suspicious indeed to DC conservatives visiting California. First they don’t talk about politics, and the next thing you know they are offering to re-orient your chakra.

Far more interesting to me, who has attended several Burning Men, but never actually got around to visiting a 1970s L5 Society meetup was the conference before the island. I’m afraid I’m weakening from the ague far too much to tell you about that now, though, so I’ll leave you with this footage of my daughter riding around in a bubble. To the future!

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2009-09-22»

All of these conversations I’ve been having online (as opposed to the dramatic monologues here) have had me thinking about the nature of online discussion, and confronting my own behaviour in them.

What are you like when you’re deep into an argument online? I have two sides: the one which you can see with my postings, which are long, mostly fiercely polite, quasi-grammatical, and, if I may say so, devastatingly reasoned.

You have to imagine me writing these, though, pacing around madly in my bedroom, muttering little speeches to myself and visualizing the horrible death of my correspondent in a hail of unavoidable saucepans. Also I drool, but only a little bit, and only from the mouth.

Is everyone like this? I don’t know, because people don’t like to talk about it. Recently, I’ve been looking at how people manage their own emotions when discussing online. It’s complicated, because the unwritten rules of much online discussion is that “if you emote, you lose”, and others that “if you emote, you win”. Either way, bringing emotions into it changes the game. But what the hell does winning and losing mean?

People talk about the disrespect and ferocity of online flame wars. I think it’s about audience. I think the novel nature of online discussions is that you have a passive, silent audience out there. I think that’s far significant than all that talk of anonymity, or the death of civilized discourse.

The closest equivalent to Internet discussion forums for me when I was young was Paddy, who I lived with. Paddy was a man who could argue for hours without coming up for breath. You’d say your triumphant logicbuster, and magically by the time you’d finished, he’d already have (verbally) posted a five page reply up in your face. I remember one night when I got so mad with him for his relentless logical verbal one-upping that the only snappy come-back I could devise with was to quietly leave the room, go upstairs to the bathroom, spray my entire face with shaving foam so I looked like a giant Michelin head, and then creep up behind him and go “ARRGH!”. I hold that I won that argument squarely and fairly. (You occasionally see this rhetorical device at Prime Minister’s Question Time.)

Anyway, what was annoying with Paddy, as I finally got him to admit one day, was that he wasn’t trying to convince you he was right: he was trying to convince a mysterious third-party.

There was no third-party in our arguments. When we got started both of us could empty a room faster than karoake-ing opera singer.

But on the public Internets, you’ve always got an eye to the third-party. Every talk you see online has an imaginary crowd around it, imaginarily clapping or stomping. Either way, you can’t just communicate these side-line emotions with the person you’re talking to, except by stumbling off into private email. Which is usually about as calming as going outside the bar for the fight. Actually, private email isn’t even private, because there is always this sense it will be magically reforwarded into the public view, exposing your vulnerability to the same audience.

Every discussion is a group monkey dance.

1 Comment »

2009-09-18»

I’ve been commenting a lot online recently. I’m enjoying getting a voice back on the Net, especially to talk about politics and other contentious topics.

Weirdly, I haven’t talked much on the Net in my own voice for years. My main voice on the Net for long long time was the NTK one, which is actually rather disengaged and aloof. Dave and I inherited a disdain for political drama by the time were doing NTK: on my side that came from the psychic damage of having to write Weekending and Spitting Image; on Dave’s I think it came from him from having to listen to people talking about writing for Weekending and fucking Spitting Image all day. Also I believe Dave thinks politics is an obscure branch of Earth Primatology. (I remember him noting the day after the landslide election that brought Labour and Tony Blair to power that maybe we should have mentioned it  once in that day’s NTK).

Anyway, because I was such a firebrand, he’d allow me to write one or two “worthy” news items a week, and I’d grudgingly allow him to write 3,000 words on chocolate anytime he wanted. In the NTK divorce, I got to bother people about the Open Rights Group (join now! Fight Peter Mandelson and meet Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre!), and he got to run SnackSpot (Confirmed sighting: Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard/ Blue Diamond Jalapeno Smokehouse Almonds). So I got a little more worthy after NTK.

When I joined EFF, and put childish things behind me, I ended up dropping that voice too, and becoming even more worthy if that were possible. Weirdly, that meant becoming far less personally outspoken. I was EFF’s main domestic activist for a while, and in that position, you quickly realise that anything you say, even informally, stops being “Danny said blah” and becomes “The EFF’s Danny O’Brien stated”. It’s like walking around online with a loudhailer stuck to your mouth; you end up just not saying anything for fear of suddenly having headlines explaining how you’re worse than Karl Rove and Hitler combined.

I do, incidentally, think that matters have got better on that front in the years since then. When I wrote about public and private registers in conversations a million years ago, I predicted that eventually we’d get used to a more informal tone from public figures:

We’ll learn a kind of tolerance for the private conversation that is not aimed at us, and that overreacting to that tone will be a sign of social naivete.

I think that’s what Twitter is all about, and permits: it’s sort of magically translated the informal register of text messages into the public space, and for public figures, allowed them to get away with throwaway comments far more than before. (My current favourite: the star of Pimp Your Ride complaining about, joking about, and finally replicating, the “yo dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an Y in your Z so you can VERB while you VERB” meme he inspired.)

That said, my political speech right now are crazily messed up. Obviously there’s the whole libertarian embarrassment. Apart from anything else, libertarians online are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and appear to be obliged to go knocking on every comment thread they see, selling copies of the Laissez-Faire Watchtower or whatever. I know that even flirting with that title has somehow required me to endlessly clarify apparently batshit notions to my more … orthodox friends. I know for instance that I spent several hours last night actively researching the economy of Somalia before concluding that, yes, it is actually fucked. But you know, I had to check, because WHO CAN TRUST THAT STATIST LACKEY THE BBC.

At the same time, however, I’ve also becoming intensely interested in privilege, feminism, racism and power inequities amongst groups. Yes, yes, very contradictory of me, I contain multitudes cool aren’t I cheers thanks. But that means I get to be in on those endless arguments too! Usually (but not always) on the other side!

We shall talk more on this topic tomorrow, because you are already bored. But I just wanted to let you know, buried down here, that I let the NTK voice on an outing this week on my twitterfeed.

So now you can quote me horribly out of context and get me into trouble. I am Hitler!

2 Comments »

2009-07-14»

I’m giving my “Living on the Edge” talk next week at OSCON. I keep telling myself it will be the same as last year’s OpenTech presentation (I pitched it to O’Reilly as “the same talk, with some of the jokes in a different order”), but of course a year has passed, and someone will launch something on Monday, and I will have to re-write it all three times, and change “Ruby” to “Haskell” in the topical jokes.

The highlight from last year’s talk was being constructively heckled by e-money expert David Birch (I believe I idly posited the switch to the Euro as the sort of centralised, high-co-ordination venture that I, out of a foolish consistency, believe can never succeed, and yet regularly do. He yelled that actually it hadn’t. My other example is Unicode, which only today I discovered has some issues of its own.)

I read David now because I can never accurately predict his opinion, which means either it’s all signal, or he is in fact a natural source of randomness, both of which are highly valuable. Here is his latest piece on the history of credit card fraud, which posits that given that everyone knows that credit cards are nigh un-protectable, it’s time we came up with something better.

That’s not a new viewpoint, but he makes a novel (to me) point. Fraud is a few points of cost for retailers and banks, which they are generally okay to swallow, but because fraud is now more scalable, those few points — which round up to billions when taken nationally or globally — have become a public order, organized crime, issue. (Not sure if I entirely believe this yet, but that doesn’t stop it being interesting). Some other nuggets are Paypal’s counterintuitively low fraud rate compared to traditional payment systems, and a link to a fantastic piece by Stephen Wilson summarizing the reasons why credit card security is lousy, and why organizations use all the wrong private data on you to confirm who you are. Quoting from Wilson’s list of personal data:

Biographical information, like name, address and DOB, needed by a bank or service provider to establish and maintain a relationship with distinct customers

Identifiers, like bank account numbers, that serve as a proxy for biographical data to manage different customers.

[BTW I contend that the major Internet security and privacy problems would be remedied if pure identifiers could be relied upon, so we didn’t need to ask customers for piles of corroborating details.]

Authentication data, like passwords, PINs and biometric templates, whether static or one-time, used to establish the legitimacy of someone claiming to be associated with biographical data or an identifier [Note that the CVCs started out as authenticators but now they’re so widely divulged and leaked that they’re really just identifiers. Asking for CVCs over the web is frankly inane, symptomatic of sloppy ad hoc security; we might as well move to 19 digit credit card numbers].

Service history, like account balance and transaction details, which are private between the customer and the service provider, and in the case of banking actually represents the entirety of the product.

And all the other personal information (family details, telephone numbers, work details, preferences, affiliations …) that accumulates, and which can be used for good (like tailoring customer service, or cross-selling with consent) or evil (cross-selling without consent, spamming, surreptitious linking across different domains, identity theft etc).

I love that throwaway comment that service history is “the entirety” of the banking product. That’s so profoundly true.

5 Comments »

2009-07-12»

Meat of this post is here: skip or link to this bit. If you read my blog for my self-indulgent inner voyages of auto-exploration, read on:

Good news: I stumbled upon an exhaustive and self-consistent set of economic and political explanations, together with deeply-documented statistics and examples that instinctively match my own observations and gut-instincts about how the world works!

Bad news: the conclusions reached are shared about a few thousand other obscure eccentrics, most of whom hover around my age, gender and social demographic, profoundly lowering the chances that we are right about anything!

Good news: I’ve been in this position before: at the birth of the popular Internet. Hence I do not feel so bad!¹

More good news: Simultaneously in my field of view, I note lots of people are pondering the same broad topic area: the size of the corporation, regulatory transaction costs, and the true level of corporate economies of scale. We near a trend.

Bad news: that means you will be bored of this topic, and snarkily saying so, on MetaFilter in a matter of hours. Soon, your closest friends will link to an insightful Clive Thomas piece they have read on the subject. Doug Rushkoff will claim he invented it. Time passes. A Newsweek cover story appears.

Good news: you still have a few minutes to be ahead of the curve!

Here is my new Question of the Moment, together with the book you should read:

What if the Firm is The Wrong Size?

More leadingly, what if the libertarians and the lefties are both right? What if big faceless corporations are the primary benefactors of the misalignment of power relationships in our modern world; but those warped power relationships have largely been created by, and lopsidedly benefit from, the coercive intrusions of the State? And what if those intrusions — sometimes at the behest of capitalists puffing on big cigars, sometimes well-meaning Fabians — have led to an oligopolistic growth in corporate size that is way beyond the point of maximum efficiency that they would naturally shrink to in a freed market? What if all those suspicions you harboured about how horrendously inefficient any major corporation, or government department, you’ve ever worked for, were actually vindicated and documented by research?

That’s the delicious and dangerously self-confirming pleasure I gained from reading Organization Theory by Kevin Carson, a doorstop of a book that assembles a  wide-ranging selection of literature, from Keynesians to Austrians, Benjamin Tucker to Galbraith, econometric studies to Marx, Wobblies to Murray Rothbard to argue that Big Capitalism has been feeding off Big Government for centuries, and that it is way past time we liquidated them both.

Carson is a left-libertarian, which is sort of like saying you’re a whale-hunting Greenpeace supporter. In polite company, it gets you a lot of pointed questions, followed by a distinct lack of future polite company. I stumbled on this book, because, like many people my age, I’ve been jamming my tongue onto the very same two-pronged fork at dinner parties for years.  I’m old enough to remember the stultifying mouldiness of socialist dogma and managed markets consensus in the seventies and early eighties, as well as the cold heartless vacuum of Thatcherite/Reagan economics that gutted it. I like free markets because they remind me of all the best new ideas in my lifetime: decentralised, individualist-driven and reciprocal. On the other hand, the distance between that fast-moving, can-do solution space and the defensive flailing of the fat-catted, smug, Tessier-Ashpool plutocrat-run oligopolies you see on CNBC implies to me that free markets are about as far from the real world as the communist utopia was from East Germany, 1988.

Carson manages, as no other author I’ve read, to mesh these left and libertarian together. To do so, he has to stitch and mend much of the traditional narrative of both. Organization Theory reads, in parts, like one imagines the rest of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Book in 1984 might read: a rapid and abbreviated account of an centuries-long ahistorical and ongoing atrocity where no-one is quite on the side you imagined.

But this is no secret conspiracy. Carson, as the book’s title implies, is a theorist of the self-defeating nature of conspiracy: of organizational reaching too large to survive on a human scale, but too big to fail. Here, history is a repeated farce of correct economical instincts overridden by the temptation to take a coercive shortcut. Merchants commandeer the state and force land-enclosure as the quickest method to leverage labor and capital into the free market, thus guaranteeing the decrepit market inefficiency of both their labor exploitation and land use. Free trade globalists use military power to pry open up international markets, thereby subsidising trade with one-sided externalities that benefit only crony corporations. Progressive reform shores up the very cartels they seek to unseat, just at the point that those monopoly’s internal contradictions have begun their own demise. Well-meaning bureaucrats devastate working-class self-organization by their professionalization of social welfare. Management fads take obvious truths about incentive and sabotage in the workplace and turn them into saccharine parodies of real reform.

To list this out makes the book sound obvious, so let me point you to Sean Gabb’s  better attempt to summarise at the UK’s other Libertarian Alliance². Far more than the precis though, note the impact of the book on Gabb’s own opinions, as a relatively “mainstream” libertarian:

…its overall theme was a revelation to me. As said, many libertarians recognise that big business is inherently exploitative. But we have also assumed that it is reasonably productive within its own terms. It is not. As already mentioned, Mr Carson believes that large firms show many of the weaknesses long since indentified in centrally-planned economies. He says:

Individual human beings make optimal decisions only when they internalize the costs and benefits of their own decisions. The larger the organization, the more the authority to make decisions is separated both from the negative consequences and from the direct knowledge of the results. And in a hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of those at the top are borne by the people who are actually doing the work. The direct producers, who know what’s going on and experience directly the consequences of decisions, have no direct control of those decisions.[p.193]

The results of this are an obsession at the top with targets that can be measured and an indifference to local understandings of how work may best be done. Profitability crises are managed by thinly-veiled attempts to make people work harder for less, by “downsizings” that cut measurable costs while destroying intangible patterns of human capital, greater incentives to management to restore profitability, and an interest in fad management theories that talk of “empowerment” and decentralised control, but are just shifts in legitimising ideology to jolly the workers along.

Strikes and other forms of industrial action should not be seen as mindless wrecking, or attacks on property or violations of contract. Rather, they are often attempts by the workers to claw back some of the humanity stolen by them.(Emphasis mine).

You see? This is a book that can turn even die-hard libertarians wobbly.

Like Gabb, I don’t necessarily agree with every pinion that Carson meshes together to form his argument. The problem with being a left-libertarian is that it’s pretty much idiosyncracy squared, so Organization Theory’s conclusions are almost guaranteed to have something you’ll disagree with: worker-owned production, free contracting, steroidically strong unions, no public transport subsidy, land property reform, FidoNet (yes, FidoNet).

But for all its sprawl, Organization Theory is the first book I’ve read in a long while that, while it only occasionally tangentially touches my domain knowledge, nonetheless manages gets the facts and policy implications right every time. I’ve read technical articles that have got both the details and the gist of the United State’s IP provisions in its Free Trade Agreements wrong (hint: they have nothing to do with free trade). And rarely have I seen anyone make the link between DeCSS and the lack of innovation in the DVD market since its introduction, let alone in the same volume as a detailed discussion of soil management (a gardener of my acquaintance says he got that right too). It’s one of those books where, if you disagree, you start scribbling in the margin. And when you agree, you start cutting and pasting into the top of your quotes file, and the bottom of your email sig.

And you’d be perfectly free to do so. Let me also point you to the draft PDFs of the book itself, which is copyrighted under the “Woody Guthrie license” (“anybody caught quoting or copying this book without our permission will be mighty good friends of ours”).

I’m still processing what I’ve read, and I’m sure I’ll end up re-processing and critiquing it here. In the mean time, I hope Carson’s book gets many more good friends, and worthy opponents. We’ve all had these thoughts about the inefficiency and the cruelty of the modern firm and the modern state. Perhaps instead of blindly picking one to support, we should consider the ties that bind them together.

¹ Truly, the emotional rewards one can extract from having been proven undeniably correct in a strongly-held position of dweebishly low popularity are not to be underestimated. Simply closing my eyes now and seeing the redoubled horror in the eyes of A.A. Gill, restaurant critic of the Sunday Times, as he wakes to a new day in the 21st century and realises, once again, that his radio co-guest from 1994 wasn’t the idiot he claimed and the Web did go on to be of pivotal importance to literature, is precious beyond compare. Screw you, successful author and racist A.A. Gill! May you continue to be cursed with a million young angry competitors, all with the face of me!

² There are two Libertarian Alliances in the UK, with the same logo and early history; both LA’s have the slogan “Let A Thousand Libertarian Alliances Bloom!”. Unlike the left, British libertarians appear to factionalise with some eventual good humour.

6 Comments »

2009-06-16»

[ Updated:. The time for this has passed; if you want to do something, install a Tor Bridge. ]

A lot of people have asked me about Opera Unite, because of my frequent hectoring about the importance of protecting and running services on the edge of the Network. In brief: how can I not love its manifesto:

Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.

I do worry, though, about launching an experiment like this without a complete and compelling demonstration of its potential, though. The demo services that Opera offers are great, but they really are just demonstrations. It’s generating a lot of excitement and “wuh?” in equal measure on the discussions I’ve seen, which is something I recognise from my attempts to proselytize the edge to those already excited by the cloud.

It occurred to me (encouraged by Stef) that a great and timely Opera Unite application, just for the next few days, would be a web proxy  for Iranians. Run it on your Opera service, post your machine’s Unite URL onto twitter with a tag #spartacus, and Iran would be drowning in potential proxies to use.

Instead of a real http proxy (like Psiphon), the best implementation would simply let you append a URL to your Unite URL and get a website back, like “http://foo.bar.operaunite.com/www.cnn.com/”. That would get rid of handing over your cookies to an unknown third-party; it’d probably also discourage people using the service for private communications (no https, in Unite — it’d be great if Opera fixed that!).

Maybe I’d also stick in a geoip check to make sure the incoming requests are coming from a known Iranian IP block, just so users could feel worthy that they’re just catering to Iranians (you could pull them out of this free geolocation database). That way we wouldn’t be creating a permanent global clunky, insecure proxy network — or at least not until Iran recovers and starts its own phishing services.

I know I’m not a good enough JS programmer to pull this off, but the Unite JavaScript API certainly appears to permit cross-domain XMLHttp calls, and you can catch generic HTTP requests using opera.io.webserver.addEventListener(‘_request’,somehandler,false);, so it is theoretically possible (and here I hand wave to the implementation Gods).

A better solution, I know, is to get copies of Tor to those in Iran. But I think that much of what we’re seeing right now is less about perfect solutions, and more about loud, temporary solutions that might help, will do minimal harm, and as a side-effect further publicize the cause of Iranian protesters.

14 Comments »

2009-06-08»

Actually, making people laugh is far less humiliating than having most people laugh at you, which has been the primary result of me coming out as a libertarian a few months ago. I could not have timed it better: while most of my friends (and me!) have been taking the piss out of libertarians for years, the recent downturn and the general narrative of What Went Wrong means that now that libertarians are about as popular as Marxists were in 1989. It doesn’t help that in the meltdown of the post-Bush Republican party, some of the remnants have seized upon sweet little shards of libertarian rhetoric as something to bind onto their crazy-cat-religion, conspiracy theories, and Obama Derangement Syndrome to make a comforting nest of denial.

My comfort during this time of tribulation has been Brian Doherty’s hilarious, moving, and, yes, often creepy Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, a broad look at the fall and rise of libertarianism in the United States (uh, and Austria, I guess) from the point of view of someone who adopted it almost literally for its punk rock value. Brian’s majestic and incredibly completist survey  covers everything from the mirror-Marxist machinations of Murray Rothbard, to the sex life of Ayn Rand, to my favorite libertarian of all, Andrew Galambos.

Galambos believed that not only was intellectual property identical to other forms of property (and thus inviolate in the libertarian tradition), so were individual ideas. He allegedly used to put a coin in a jar for the descendants of Tom Paine every time he used the word “liberty”, so that they could be refunded for his use of Paine’s term. Much more concretely, he required everyone who listened to his lectures to sign an NDA, agreeing not to reveal any of his “property” without first negotiating with him for their personal right to spread his ideas.

I have meant to use Galambosianism as an example of the dangers of too much IP protectionism for several years, but sadly his defence of his property was so complete that his ideas are utterly obscure and his name so unremembered that it’s been hard to be able to find anything to cite. Brian Doherty is to be commended for bringing his name back into currency, albeit by actively breaking the very principles Galambos espoused.

Anyway, Doherty made me realise that my take on libertarianism isn’t so far away from the mainstream of the tradition. I always assumed the anarchists were on the even-wackier side of the fence, whereas Doherty brings them center-forward, and argues that it was only in the 1970s that so-called libertarians even considered consorted with Their Enemy, The State. Before that, the libertarians were making the same kind of arguments that any other anarchist group worth their druthers was making: that this State business was a mistake from the start, and needed to wither away as soon as was logistically possible.

I like this position as a political stance to take, because I’ve always been emotionally close to anarchism as a theory, and rather comforted by its lack of any practical consequence. The closer libertarians get to being included in any government, the less I like them. I’m not a libertarian because I think they should in charge. I’m a libertarian because I don’t think anyone can be trusted with that much responsibility. I’d rather busy myself trying to think up institutions, tools, and cultural capital that can be created to prevent that from ever happening.

Actually, that’s close to a lie. The reason I’m a libertarian is an accident of timing, and of influences. Here’s an interesting (US) fact: Generation Xers, like myself, are more loyal to the Republican party than Boomers or Gen-Yers. I can imagine why that despicable fact is true. I grew up when the Left was indulging in a severe self-detonation, and laissez-faire ideas were briefly fashionably new and exciting. I read what I now realise were proto-libertarian tracts under the bed (I also read some awesome Marxist propaganda, but it didn’t really catch). In fact, I fall precisely into a distinct category in Brian Doherty’s taxonomy of libertarians, which he describes here:

[Robert Anton] Wilson’s libertarianism represents a unique strain within the modern movement, a libertarian house in which there are many more mansions than there were in the 1940s to 1970s. Libertarian scholar Chris Sciabarra believes libertarianism needs to become a more “dialectical” philosophy, subsuming more about human life and culture than just politics. He should appreciate the Wilsonian style of having libertrian values inform not just politics but a vision of a life entire. Wilson edited the School of Living’s journal, which had been called Balanced Living and which he renamed A Way Out — a way out of a way of life, state, church and culture that seemed a trap. He scandalized the more puritan among their vegetarian clean living readers in the early 1960s with articles celebrating Wilhelm Reich, sexual liberty, and Ezra Poun, and running poems by Norman Mailer.

Hippies. Anyway, this sounds much more like the scion I’m attached to, although it’s always sort of depressing to discover that your entire outlook is still determined by books you read when you were fifteen. I shall never laugh at geeks quoting The Moon is A Harsh Mistress again.

It also means that I think it perfectly understandable that a generation younger than me (and it’s amazing how many of my Gen-Xers are in denial that there could possibly be such a thing) is less enamored with the L-word. I think I came out as libertarian out of a desperate desire to become more radical as I grew older, rather than just settle into some genial liberal senility. As it is, I’m just playing exactly to type. There’s probably other more exciting philosophies than my warmed-up P.J. O’Rourkism right now. I’m not so old that I’m not fascinated to know what they are. Any ideas?

7 Comments »

2009-06-05»

When do you stop being a reader online, and start being a participant? This would seem to be an important question, especially among those who insist that the exact ratios between consumers and creators should determine how significant the result is. That is, if most “user-generated” content on the Net is made up of a tiny percentage of the overall audience, should we care about it less? Me, I don’t think so, but for arguments that get bogged down in exactly how “democratic” the Internet is, it does seem to be critical.

What I do think is that the very fact that the line is blurred is in itself significant. Let me contrast it with my experience growing up in the Seventies and Eighties. I didn’t go to arty clubs in London; I didn’t make my own teen fanzine. I didn’t even send off for any fanzines. What I did was buy Time Out, and FactSheet Five, and read the reviews. Obsessively. I loved it. I don’t know why I rarely watched the films I read about, or buy the thousands of zines that Mike Gunderloy (pboh) obsessively reviewed each issue. It just seemed a step too far, somehow. I was perhaps a little scared that the reality wouldn’t live up to the dream. But I’m sure there were thousands, hundreds of thousands like me. People read books, never knowing there are whole communities of book-readers who create conventions and have conversations about those books, writing fan fiction and holding long correspondences with the author. It’s not that they can’t imagine it, but it’s that there’s a natural stopping point. You’d have to be crazy to finish the latest Neil Gaiman book, and then think you could write him a letter.

When I went online for the first time, that distinction blurred for the first time. I’d read my heroes posting items, and then I’d reply (just really because the keyboard was there, and the bulletin board prompt gave you that option), and my heroes would write back. I’d be involved. It was barely a transition. It’s the same frisson people get when celebrities call them out on Twitter. Actually, they don’t even have to be acknowledged; just the figment of a conversation is more than you’d expect reading a book or watching a film.

This may be obvious, or even hard to imagine a world without that lack of transition if you’ve grown up with the Net. Talking to Debbie today, she described how Sears Catalogues were called “wishbooks” in the early West, and we talked about how FactSheet Five was a wishbook, too. It broadened your mind: but it only occurred to the most ambitious (or deluded) that you could actually pursue those wishes, or that they represented anywhere that was truly accessible: just viewable. I think old media taught us to observe the spectacle, but assume it took place somewhere else, somewhere remote.

It takes a while, even online, to notice this is possible: that such-and-such may have a blog, and might read the comments, and might reply. But it’s not quite the same leap, especially as you quickly find yourself in a community of others making those leaps just like you. It’s not how many create; it’s how easy the jump from watcher to do-er is. The two are connected: the easier the transition, the more creators there are. But the transitions the thing. Not everybody wants to be a creator; but everybody who wants to create should at least know that that is an option.

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2009-06-04»

A couple of months back when I decided to go and see some live comedy in the city. I mostly avoid watching stand-up, because I’ve picked up the habit from real comedians of sitting at the back, nodding and saying “Okay, that’s funny”, instead of actually laughing. Also, after a decade or so of orbiting comedy, I was pretty burnt out on watching it. The last time I’d seen any stand up in the US was in 2002 or so, and it wasn’t that appealing. Racist jokes about Mexicans and other people who don’t go to comedy clubs, extended Seinfeldisms, and witty self-deprecation from guys who were hovering dangerously close to public self-loathing didn’t seem that interesting.

The show I went to in April was interesting, though. Even the new acts were clearly very polished, and the established acts were clearly going in interesting directions. Nobody made bad mistakes, and some of them were making deliberately great “mistakes” — trying out new directions that most circuit stand-ups just don’t dare do. The mood of the show was very upbeat and friendly, and the comedians obviously liked each other and hung out socially. I went away thinking “there’s something going on here”, and spent the night clicking around the web to find out what it was.

Here’s what I patched together. In 2000, San Francisco got a comedy college, started up by old hand Kurtis Matthews. Matthews had been doing comedy from 1984 onwards, starting in L.A. and rising up with Bill Hicks, Jon Lovitz and others. In the late Nineties, he burned out on the dream and instead pursued his (by then) elaborate fantasy of actually getting a proper office job and not having to live out of Travelodges, Denny’s and unfriendly bars. But still the back-monkey wouldn’t exit: he still wanted to be involved in comedy, just not as one of its many frazzled front-line infantry in the sweatshop comedy club chains of America. So he started teaching comedy in his home town: taking all those people who wanted to do stand-up the way some people want to sky-dive — not necessarily as a career, but as a primal fear to overcome — as well as semi-professionals who wanted some honest feedback and advice from people who weren’t, at that moment, drunk and waiting for buffalo wings.

My stand-up career began and ended on a Summer night in Edinburgh in 1990. I’d finished college. My parents had just separated, so I didn’t really have a home to come back to. I’d rolled up to the Fringe without any shows to be in, because one of my friends had called me and told me that my best friend had broken up with his practically-wife, and was now sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend. Oh, and they were all trying to run shows and sleep in the same room, as you do when you go to Edinburgh for the Fringe. I think I was there on a combination-mission of suicide-watch and youthful rubber-necking.

I also desperately needed to know what to do with my life. My college friends, Ben Moor and Al Murray, were both setting off to London to be famous. Others, like Stewart Lee and Rich Herring, were already there, grinding through the circuit. Armando Ianucci was I think doing some weird thing on Scottish radio, but there were rumours he was heading down south too. We all knew Armando was brilliant. We all wanted to be there when he hit. Meanwhile, my father, alone and worried that I was become attracted to a duther education course in Advanced Bohemian and Defaulted Student Loans, had put in an application in my name for a job at a computer magazine called .EXE. They were asking for 1000 words and an example of my coding style.

I hung around Edinburgh, without a show. I stood in as compere for a lunch show we did called the £1.99 cabaret, masterminded I think by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley. Eventually I plucked up enough courage to do a real open mic, outside the protection of an audience half-made up of my friends. I’d seen Stew and Rich do it; it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

I don’t remember much. I remember we all had 30 seconds or so before we were gonged off. I remember a Scottish lady actually standing on a table and screaming at me “You’re shite!” for most of my half-minute. I remember running into Simon Munnery, but I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I wandered around Edinburgh’s yeasty night for hours.

At the end of the night, I decided, grandiosely, that I had two options as a life goal. Either I could do stand-up, or I could try and devote my life to writing a computer program that would make people cry (with happiness or sadness, I didn’t care). I plumped for the latter. No-one I explained it to understood what I meant at the time, because this was before Myst or Doom or the Internet. A few weeks later, I went for the interview at .EXE. They asked me who my favourite comedians were. They hadn’t heard of them, because all my comedy heroes were 23 years old or younger. I was 21.

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2009-06-03»

So it was being stuck without wifi in the Library of Congress the other week that finally made me decide to overwrite the T-Mobile firmware on my Android G1 with something with root access. I was talking with the US Copyright and Patent offices about how to improve access to copyrighted material for the reading disabled (in the hopes, partially, to encourage them to support the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at WIPO the following week).

I know some people frown on net access at such affairs, but as Cory once noted, if you think people are distracted when they have net at meetings, you should see how distracted they get when they don’t have net.  A bunch of us were scrabbling to get information in and out of the public meeting in advance of the transcript becoming available. So, for instance, I recorded my comments onto my phone, and then mailed them out to the rest of the EFF international staff to hear as they were already preparing to fly to Geneva.

The same thing happened, only more fervently at WIPO, with Jamie Love and other attendees  frantically twittering out to the wider world about the imminent attempts to kill the treaty, and thus getting the visible external support they needed to put pressure on countries to keep the Treaty alive (thanks to everyone who contacted their governments, by the way).

All of this networked analysis and activism gets much harder when you don’t have laptop connectivity. Because my G1 phone wasn’t rooted (and T-Mobile forbids tethering apps in Google’s Android app Market), I couldn’t link my computer to my phone’s 3G network. And I wasn’t quite ready to multi-task listening to my fellow panellists and attempting to re-flash firmware at the same time.

I’m glad I waited. It turns out that these days, it’s relatively easy to drop in a version of Android that gives you power over your own device. These instructions on how to root your G1 take you through the tortuous (but by now pretty foolproof) procedure.

In the end, I chose to install JesusFreke’s distribution of the Android OS, which now has a great little utility to manage who gets root on your phone (each application’s request is intercepted, and you, as user, get to allow or deny it). This tethering application is incredibly easy-to-use, and lets you share your 3G connection via wifi or bluetooth (I haven’t tried the bluetooth). You can WEP encrypt the wifi connection, or allow access to only selected users.

Of course, next time I go to the LoC, I’ll be sure to keep the wifi node open. I wouldn’t want the MPAA guys doing without!

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