I was so glad The Register -- which is really the best publication for all the hard-core tech news -- much better than TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb or CNET (because it has more critical distance from Silicon Valley) -- ran a story about how fake this "break the Internet" stuff is that the geeks have been flogging lately.
It really is a joy to read a piece about the fakeness of the "break the Internet" meme after seeing it EVERYWHERE regarding SOPA -- as the Register itself points out in a link to an anti-SOPA piece.
I wish I could find now (I'll have to dig through past blogs) the reference to that engineer's blog who also called this out during the anti-SOPA madness and explained how it totally wasn't true, technically (and I maintain that it's a hysterical literary device -- every time I hear any tekkie say something is "broken" (like Congress) I know it really means "something is in the way of our taking power" and I discount it heavily.
Here we go with the money quote:
The absence of permissions on our personal data and the absence of permissions on digital copyright objects are two sides of the same coin.
Amen, amen. And that's what the more grown-up tekkies and platforms do come to see -- it's why Second Life's makers had to get over their hippie open-source period and increasingly crack down on third-party viewers that copied everything and griefed people with outing privacy (two sides of the same coin, see). They have had to develop more and more precise policies and regulations to control the inevitable tendencies built into flaws in the web by Tim Berners-Lee et. al. to out privacy and strip the monetarizing capacity of private property.
The article brilliantly summarizes reams of arguments from copyleftists and copyrightists but then takes the conversation further, where it seldom goes. One says "information wants to be free" -- usually their own is available for a fee, however. The other says privacy and private property are related and it's ok to charge.
You know, we saw all this play out in the endless wrangling about interoperability for virtual worlds. BTW, this all got hijacked by the US military from the private sector and the US military took over the standards process in the IETF with nobody but me complaining. Wonder how that's going.
It boiled down to the willingness of tekkies to embed tags or have meta data or do other stuff as an *engineering solution* (i.e. not just tucking notecards into objects or putting space on an object description for "intentions" or silly Creative Commons licenses). They weren't willing. As I often say, in quoting Jaron Lanier, "The Internet is this way because we made it this way." Well, make it a different way.
But for that, a change of mind is required, and sometimes this has to come from "having the mind concentrated wonderfully."
What's terribly intriguing about this seminal Register piece is this kicker, coming from Mark Bide, "a veteran consultant who advises publishers on metadata":
"You can take two views," he told me. "One is that every piece of information flowing around a network is a good thing, and we should know everything about everybody, and have no constraints on access to it all." People who believe this, he added, tend to be inflexible - there is no half-way house.
"The alternative view is that we can take the technology to make privacy and intellectual property work on the network. The function of copyright is to allow creators and people who invest in creation to define how it can be used. That's the purpose of it.
"So which way do we want to do it?" he asks. "Do we want to throw up our hands and do nothing? The workings of a civilised society need both privacy and creator's rights."
But this a new way of thinking about things: it will be met with cognitive dissonance. Copyright activists who fight property rights on the internet and have never seen a copyright law they like, generally do like their privacy. They want to preserve it, and will support laws that do. But to succeed, they'll need to argue for stronger property rights.
They have yet to realise that their opponents in the copyright wars have been arguing for those too, for years. Both sides of the copyright "fight" actually need the same thing.
Exactly. And it will require something else, much deeper: conceding that the Internet has to be made for people, and not people forced to adapt to the engineered Internet, as the engineers, with their legal-nihilist culture want it to be. That will take some major growing up.
I'm not sure I completely agree with this article's curious crowbar for forcing geeks to stop liberating everything because their own data about their own selves needs a way of not being liberated (you know, private property -- that's why they call it private!).
Because I think the encryption that the geeks would love to put into mobile conversations or other online conversations are ultimately designed to avoid accountability for bad behaviour and the consequences of licentiousness, which isn't really related to securing the ability to trade your creations and earn a living.
It would be great if they could completely turn around their conception of this (and the Register would have to do this, too) and conceive of the issues as follows:
o Privacy is about opt-IN, not opt-out. It means easy, intuitive, staged, granulated, graded sliders for a host of expressions and identities that the user develops as his own "suitcase" that he takes around the web, unpacking it *as he wishes* on this or that site related to work, socializing, entertainment, etc. Instead of disrupting real life with inept and disruptive "code-as-law," social media should strive for versimilitude with real life -- just as in real life the conversations in the bar or the bedroom or the boardroom do not have to bleed out among life's compartments or reach the government or hostile parties, so online, the conversations in different spaces should have firewalls that work *for the user*.
(And just as in real life, conversations behind those walls of privacy aren't an excuse to indulge in bad behaviour much less crime, and law-enforcement is entitled to go into those spaces to ask questions when there is probable cause to do so, so online, that must be secured for the exact same reasons of a civil society as in real life).
o Private property is legitimate, necessary, and possible to maintain online, and people need not be coerced or browbeaten or "encourged" to share and "liberate" content. They must be able to make a living with digital creations if they chose to, and there must be an ENGINEERED permissions regime and secure micropayments and macropayments regime to enable this.
That's all. It isn't so hard when you decide to do so. My main beefs with the anti-SOPA crowd were as follows:
o tekkies screamed about "breaking the Internet" merely for the demand to block pirate sites and links to pirate sites so that pointers to the DNS of those sites wouldn't work, yet they block malware sites and set up systems to control pointing to DNS all the time when they want to stop things they don't like (even my blog).
o tekkies smugly tell us encryption on digital rights management "can't work" for the obvious reasons of cracking and spoofing, and yet they tell us that they can encrypt security (and obviously banking and other sites are encrypted and work). Yes, they are different technical regimes manifesting with different technical means. So what! The premise is the same: either you decide to encrypt and protect and do your best, or you don't. The will isn't there with the copyleftists for *ideological*, not technical reasons.
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